Xerox Phaser 8400 - Good in its Day (Xerox Phaser 8400B)

Name: blondgem

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Product:	Xerox Phaser 8400B
Date:	27/01/08 (325 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: quality print

Disadvantages: not duplex, bit slow now

Within my position at work, it is extremely important that I have a decent printer and to be honest, I don't have one, I have three that I use for various print jobs that I may perform in-house.

The Xerox Phaser 8400 is what I call my back up plan, used occasionally, when I may have ran out on consumables for my other printers of if I want to get a job done quick, I may use them all at the same time.

All our printers are leased and unfortunately the Phaser 8400 is no longer available to purchase or lease as new anymore, however some companies do offer ex-demonstration machines and you may be able to acquire one of these this way. Since the 8400 was born, it has been upgraded and hs now been replaced by the 8560.

The 8400 however I feel during its day was an excellent machine and still continues to produce quality prints on a daily basis. The machine itsef does not take ink, it uses crayon blocks, which give the print a very shiny look, no matter whether you are using economical paper or high quality print paper.

As you can expect, as time goes by, printers get quicker and spit the sheets out at a phenomal rate. This particular printer is capable of doing 24 colour pages per minute, which is okay if you produce a bare minimum in-house and are just using it for one off print jobs, however if you are producing print copies by the thousand then the speed is as good as the latest Xerox models that are available. The rate for black and white is also the same 24 pages per minute.

The printer has one tray that you can load with a maximum size of A4. It is capable of taking a ream of paper, 500 sheets, however I have found if you do fill it to its capacity, it does tend to jam so I receommend to fill it half full to prevent this from occurring as it is a bit of pain having to get up every second to unblock a jam that could have been prevented in the first place.

The print quality is excellent, depending on what publication you are printing from and will print 600 x 600 dpi which is more or less adequate for any office environment, that isn't for graphic design uses but general colour office prints. The print quality also depends on what resolution images you are using too, you can't expect too much from a printer if you aren't using dcent enough material to start off with, they can't work miracles.

I have rarily had to have an engineer out to this machine. Paper jams are very easy to clean, consumables are very easily to fit and should you have any problems with the actual print quality you are able to calibrate the machine to eliminate any problems that you may have using the control panel on the top of the machine.

Few Problems

The machine is only capable of taking A4 paper therefore if you are looking to produce a professional document it won't take SRA4 paper to trim down using the crop marks.

The machine doesn't offer the duplex facility. This is when a machine is capable of printing on both sides. So if you want to this you need to print on one side first then put the paper back in the printer and send it through again to do the other side.

As the machines uses crayon as of ink, should you ever wish to laminate anything from the machines that take crayon, it proves impossible as the heat from the laminator melts the crayon and turns it into a horrible mess.

Like I said I use this as my back up plan, however in its day it was a very good machine, but Xerox continue to make improvements and things will always get better. A good machine for general day to day office printing.

Summary: The Xerox Phaser 8560 has now replaced this model