Printing at warp speed

Xerox’s state-of-the-art Phaser 6360 is a single-pass colour laser printer that offers high-speed performance for SMB customers.

CRN Test Centre engineers looked at the Phaser 6360/DN, which offers 1200 x 600dpi native resolution and up to 2400 x 600dpi enhanced resolution.

At $1599, Xerox touts it as the value model of the line. With standard automatic two-sided printing, it’s a step up from the base-model 6360/N at $1399, but comes with less memory than the 6360/DT, the next model in the family. At the top of the line is the DX, which includes an internal hard drive.

Performance is where the unit really excels. It can produce output at speeds of up to 42 pages per minute (ppm) in colour and black and white, with the first page out in as little as nine seconds. A 1GHz processor and 256 Mbytes of memory help it attain those speeds, and its memory can be upgraded to 1 Gbyte if necessary to boost performance. The Phaser 6360’s duty cycle is a generous 100,000 pages per month, and it offers true Adobe PostScript 3 printing.

Engineers tested for performance and image quality using a stopwatch and select files from the Spencer & Associates Printer Test Suite, a collection of documents and photos designed to push printers to their limits. In one example, the Phaser 6360/DN printed a photo of a castle in 10.2 seconds, compared to 13 seconds to 90 seconds for previous generations of the product.
In order to achieve such performance, Xerox has reduced image quality in the default print mode. While produced quickly, the printout lacked some of the vividness of the output produced by older models. To match the image quality of its predecessors, the Phaser 6360/DN also offers a fully enhanced mode, which took 34 seconds to produce the same image.

Text, on the other hand, rarely needs enhancing. The Phaser 6360/DN printed a 10-page monochrome Microsoft Word document in 21.5 seconds and a 10-page Word document with colour headings in 22.1 seconds. In each case, the first page printed in just eight seconds. Not counting the eight seconds that the printer takes to get itself going, those performance numbers correlate to a print speed of about 40 ppm, close to its rated speed of 42 ppm.

It is amazing enough that paper can even be fed through the printer at such speed, let alone the fact that images are laid down at the same time. For comparison, previous generations took as long as 50 seconds to produce the same print job.