No Longer Manufactured by Xerox--Hmmm?
Written: Mar 20 '00 (Updated Mar 22 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Excellent Warranty from an Excellent Company
Cons: Low Budget Machine with Major Paper-Path Problems
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| lap0530's Full Review: Xerox DocuPrint XJ6C InkJet Printer |
The DocuPrint XJ6C
A little over a year ago, I purchased the Xerox DocuPrint XJ6C® color inkjet printer for $120 at Office Depot. Originally listed at $130, this printer is widely available for $100 today. One reason that the price has been so steeply discounted is that the product, according to Xerox’s web page, is no longer manufactured by Xerox.
This unit has many nice features for an inexpensive ink jet printer, and for home and light office use, may be an entirely adequate machine. On the other hand, my volume of printing is higher than this printer can sustain, and I find myself looking for a workhorse printer, even though this one is still “working” and still has nearly two years left on its manufacturer’s warranty.
My major complaint with this machine is its inability to handle printing jobs based on large (multi-page) documents. Each time I use the machine, I have to nurse it through the print job. The problems were not apparent at first, but grew worse over time. Though the printer is rated by Xerox at 1,000 pages per month, my experience indicates that anything approaching that volume will tax this printer to its limits.
Features
Like all Xerox products, this inexpensive printer came with an unprecedented three-year warranty with overnight exchange service and unlimited toll-free support. I find myself in the interesting position of being able to receive a free replacement, but unsure of whether I personally want it.
Print quality is adequate, though not outstanding. The normal 600 x 600 dpi resolution on plain paper is suitable for most printing jobs, and a photorealistic mode of 1200 x 600 dpi is available for use with special photogloss paper. I found the color printing to be excellent, with a minimum of banding at the highest resolution, though the colors were somewhat subdued.
Forget about print speed at the high resolution—an 8 x 10 color photo I scanned in required around 30 minutes to print. Print speed for black text was another matter, and I was able to achieve something near the 5 ppm advertised by Xerox.
Setup and installation were very easy, and the printer included some fun and interesting software such as Photo Studio for image manipulation and Photo Fantasy for creating personal photos with fantasy backgrounds.
Shortcomings
Finding ink cartridges has been a problem since day one. Though the printer was purchased at Office Depot, they typically have the cartridges on back order. Separate individual color and black cartridges were an initial selling point, but I have found that they all tend to be used up at about the same rate anyway, so there is not much real advantage there. Once they are located, at $10 each for color and black cartridges, the original purchase price is soon only a small part of the overall investment in this product.
I have experienced major paper-handling problems with this machine that worsened with time. One of the most annoying characteristics of the printer is that if the printer is already on when I turn on my computer, the printer will automatically send three or four sheets through, printing a single special character like “§” in the upper lefthand corner of each. Once the printer finishes this cycle, it will print normally for single-page documents.
But longer documents might or might not print correctly. Although muti-page documents printed correctly for the first six months, I began having problems soon thereafter. The printer would not completely eject the first page and would begin printing the second page at the bottom of the first. This necessitated manually removing each page when it was finished, which also made it impossible to leave the printer while a print job finished. The printer has a “back out” button that easily unjams the paper from its all-too-frequent paper jams.
The XJ6C requires a bi-directional IEEE 1284 parallel printer cable (not included). The idea, of course, is that the printer could communicate its status and ink levels to the computer, and these could be displayed. The reality is that this never worked very well. Replacing a spent ink cartridge sometimes did result in the ink level being reported as full, but other times did not.
Overall Evaluation
Since the printer is under warranty, my plan is to take advantage of the replacement service and give the new printer to my college-student daughter. I suspect that her lower-volume printing requirements will not overwhelm the machine the way my higher-volume requirements did. Meanwhile, it’s back to HP for me.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
lap0530
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Location: Anderson, SC
Reviews written: 122
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About Me:
Psychology and management professor and business consultant
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