Great for some, but not for me
Written: Sep 14 '03
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Pros: Cheap prints, fast
Cons: Can't laminate prints, ink scratches off, questionable durability, hard to write on printouts.
The Bottom Line: Not recommended, as you will most likely run into problems with either laminating or the ink falling off.
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| sjasonsmith's Full Review: Xerox Tektronix Phaser 860DP Solid ink Printer |
When we were searching for color printers at work and saw he Phaser 860DP, it appeared too good to be true. As it later turned out, it really was too good to be true.
The printer does have some very good traits, however. The solid ink is easy to handle and can be filled quickly--just drop a couple bricks in. It prints decent color quickly, which is more than we could say about inkjets which tend to be rather slow.
Shortly after purchasing three of this printers, they began to exhibit problems...
The first thing we noticed, is that due to the wax ink, you cannot hot laminate anything from it, or you will have a nice laminated swirl of color, which usually ends up being an ugly shade of brown. No problem, we thought, we'll just cold laminate it. Although it did not look as good as hot laminating, is seemed to work fine...until we went back a couple months later and saw that apparently the cold laminating adhesive dissolves the ink, because it had bled about 1/4 inch all around. So, no laminating for these printouts! In addition to not being able to laminate the printouts, the wax ink is nearly impossible to write on! You must use a permanent marker to write on top of the ink!
Then, I printed out a rather large pamphlet, and as is my habit, I rolled it up into a tight tube and carried around with me for a while, and guess what?!? The ink was falling off! Due to the nature of the ink, it sits on the paper's surface and doesn't truly bond with it, meaning that with a little bit of stress it falls off! You can test this by printing something and scratching it with your fingernail.
Already being disillusioned with these printers, they then began to break. And they began to break as soon as they were out of warranty, which does not make for cheap repairs. Our recent experience with them has caused me to greatly question their durability.
Last but not least, although they appear to do a fine job with photographs and normal text, just the other day we were comparing some other laser printers with fine detail prints--such as paragraphs written in a 2pt font. While this was perfectly readable, albeit very small, on a 1200 dpi laser, it was absolutely illegible on the Phaser 860.
All said and done, I would not recommend this printer to most people, but we have found one good use for it. We have it installed in a public computer lab, and it allows us to quickly produce cheap color prints. It is nice because we can sell the prints for 1/5th the price in other labs, and most students don't mind the downsides as much as I do.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 3000
Operating System: Windows and Macintosh
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Epinions.com ID:
sjasonsmith
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Reviews written: 22
Trusted by: 1 member
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