Customer Reviews

Xerox Phaser 6130/N Color Laser Printer

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Print quality is great (including photos). Fast, precise, and easy to hook up into your network (I have a Mac and a PC, and both recognized the printer immediately). I've been using mine for the past 6 months without problems.

The 6130/N is power hungry, so initially I had problems using it in my small office, as computers and printer all shared the same power outlet. The lights would dim and the UPS would trip whenever the printer started working on a document. Had to move it to the other side of the house. That didn't bother me, but it may bother you.

Xerox charges too much for memory expansion. Buy normal 1 GB DDR memory stick for notebooks instead (Kingston's M12864E40 or KVR667D2S5/1G both work fine). Also, if you need your printer connected to your wi-fi network, go with one of those wireless game adapters instead of the module Xerox sells, which is also quite expensive.

One more thing: you will have a shock when you need new toner cartridges, though, as they are quite expensive. I didn't get there yet, as the printer comes with full set of toner cartridges, but you should always consider the price of consumables when buying a printer. The 6130/N is still a good option for me, even considering this extra cost.

I am awarding this printer 5 stars for its ease of installation, quality of output, quality of workmanship, unit price and the average cost of a printed page.

The Xerox Phaser 6310N appears to be a solid, quality unit. Given that you will print a couple thousand pages before you need to buy your next toner, you get a lot of value for the price. Thereafter, based on the prices currently listed at Amazon, paying $70 for 2500 black and white pages is not bad at all. In fact, on a per-page basis, you are paying significantly less vs. what you would spend on a generic ink-jet printer.

I installed the printer at home, in the basement, plugged into a wireless Linksys router via an Ethernet wire. My printer is now taking jobs from 5 different computers, connected through the same router over Wi-Fi and running Windows XP and Vista.

The unit comes in a nice, neat box where very little space is wasted. The unit is very much assembled and ready to go. There is a `Quick Installation', poster-sized guide (also a 'flash' animation on the CD) that explains in detail how to remove the various sticky tapes that held the printer together during transportation and lock in the toner cartridges. Once that's done, you plug in the power, connect the printer via either USB or Ethernet (USB and Ethernet cables NOT included), turn it on, set up your favorite language if it's not English and you are ready to go. On the computer side, you need to install the Xerox printer driver.

The driver installation(*) was relatively quick and nearly flawless. For it to proceed, the setup program must first find the printer. Since the printer was not physically connected to the laptop, it immediately started to look for IP-based printers. You must make sure that the printer is turned on and it has an IP address(**) while this is happening. The status page, which you can print from the front panel, will tell you if that is the case. My DHCP-enabled Linksys router assigned an address to the printer so no complicated setup was required. On the Vista side, I had to give Vista permission for a couple of tasks to complete. The setup gives you the opportunity to register your printer online. I agreed and it was quick and easy even though I was surprised that the setup knew my printer's serial number but not the model which I have to pick it myself from a long drop-down list.

From the moment I opened the box to the time I printed my first page off a document, it took less than one hour. I can see how some users may require help with the network installation part. I cannot say how Xerox supports end-users with more complex network setups because I did not have to call the tech support.


The Phaser 3310N is a large, solid box (see Amazon's picture) and it is so because it holds large (fully loaded) toner cartridges and the fuser unit. Printing is quick and quiet and I experienced no paper jams yet. The colors are bright and both the text and the graphics are crisp - I printed some very complicated flowcharts and a colorful logo to test and I was satisfied with the result. Out of the box, over 200 PCL and PostScript fonts are supported. Other features include 128Mb of memory, support for various paper sizes and paper types including glossies and envelopes, it can be set to go into PowerSaver mode after a period of inactivity (and I reduced it from the 30 minute default to 5 minutes), can be set to produce an audible tone on various conditions, will produce Configuration pages with values for various settings and parameters including the environment's temperature and humidity.

This printer should be ideal for the small office and it could be great for the home if the relatively large size does not bother you. In my case, it doesn't because it's going to stay in the basement. Memory expansion or wireless connections were not issues for me but those who have such concerns should do some research before buying.

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(*) Note that you will have to install the driver on ALL the computers that are going to use the printer. Every time you install the driver, you will be prompted to register again. After you complete your first registration, ignore any subsequent invitations.

(**) I can think of 3 basic way you can connect the printer without having to buy any extra hardware, other than a cable, if you don't have one already:
1 - Personal printer - use a USB cable to connect it directly to your desktop computer (or your laptop's docking station)
2 - Shared printer - after connecting the printer as above and you install the printer driver, share it (the specific steps depend on your operating system but it's usually easy). This way, anyone on the same network can use it for as long as the computer that's sharing it is up.
3 - Network printer - you plug it into a network port or directly into a router using an Ethernet cable. Unless you place some restrictions, everyone on the network should be able to use the printer for as long as it is on and the network is up.

Like many others who have posted reviews, and as a lifelong computer user with 20 years of printing experience, I had become completely fed up with the overall quality of printers offered for sale for the last 10 year or so. Inkjet printers as a category have gone to crap; our first inkjet (circa 1994) was great, but the last three I have purchased have all quickly degenerated into useless, moneysucking, ink-spraying paperweights.* Inability to print the simplest things (like travel reservations, order receipts, etc.) without buying yet another set of ink was driving me up the wall. "Entry-level" laser printers had finally become affordable, but the horror stories of delicate operation, funny smells, horrendous noises, outrageous power consumption, and deplorable Customer disService departments were scaring me off.

After much reading and calculating and meandering, I took the plunge and ordered a 6130. It arrived quickly and was well packaged, and has been the mirror opposite of all the horror stories I had read about "affordable" laser printers. It is quiet, fast, has never jammed, produces clean, sharp prints, and was quite easy to set up. Plenty of documentation (both printed and on disc) was included. It is taller than an inkjet, but very compact, basically a 16" cube. I run the printer via USB with a Toshiba laptop running WinXP SP2; installing the driver was quick and easy, and the print quality is great. After struggling for years with Canon, HP, and Epson inkjets,** I can't begin to say how happy I am with this sweet machine! Buy with confidence!

* In all honesty, I have kept the last of those (an Epson CX5000) around for use as a scanner, but ripped out its useless printer guts long ago.

** In the defense of Canon, HP, and Epson, they all produce wonderful professional-level products. But unless you're running a service bureau or just enjoy burning cash, how can the expense be justified or an individual. The units they target for home use are horrendous! Have your photos printed at Wal-Mart or Target (as a semi-pro photographer, it kills me to type that!), and get this Phaser for your personal business use.

This printer doesn't support automatic duplex printing, but you can achieve duplex printing manually. Also, the quality of photo prints isn't great, but is very acceptable. In fact, right now, there are no color laser printers in the sub $1,000 dollar price range that can produce ink jet quality photo prints. However, color lasers do everything else very well. The Xerox Phaser 6130 Color laser produces excellent text and great graphical illustrations. In addition, the printer weighs only 38 lbs. It has native networking (10/100 Mb), which is convenient because you can put the printer anywhere there is a network port in your house. You can also connect a wireless adapter to it as an option. I chose to connect the printer to a wall port. The printer awakes from sleep automatically when a job arrives, and starts printing within about 20 to 30 seconds. I upgraded my printer's memory by ordering a Kingston - Memory - 1 GB - SO DIMM 200-pin - DDR2 - 533 MHz / PC2-4200 chip. Installation was easy. Xerox also has an excellent support site for all of its printers. I also got this printer for $259.99 + $38.00 shipping from The Factory Depot by way of Amazon. That was a great price. I use this printer in my home. If you are a business, you may want to look at the Xerox 6180 DN, which supports automatic duplexing and networking in addition to other special features. The 6130 supports Adobe Postscript Level 3 and PCL 6 emulations. The printer also supports the Pantone standard in addition to a number of networking protocols -- most native -- some optional. Overall, I love this printer. It produces book quality text for about 15 cents per page. If you want to learn more about the 6130, [...]

I unwrapped this item today, so I don't have any information on its longterm quality. But so far, it's making a very good impression. The set-up and installation were very easy, and it worked great both connected directly with a USB cable, and as a wireless network printer. I plugged it directly into my Netgear WGT624 Super G 108 Mbps Wireless Router (which I also recommend highly). Then went on my Mac laptop, used the Printer Setup Utility, which found the printer, and I was printing in seconds.

My wife's laptop also immediately recognized the printer from the wireless router, and printed too.

Maybe I'm easily satisfied, but I wasn't expecting things to work so quickly and effortlessly.

This printer is definitely more expensive than inkjets, and it's not recommended for photos or labels, but if you need a good quality printer, want to use laser cartridges that are FAR less expensive per page than inkjet cartridges, want it to work on your wireless network, and want fast printing in crisp detail, this so far looks like a good bet.

The XEROX Phaser 6130 is a lower priced color laser printer that will satisfy many users that don't have demanding printing needs but would like the benefits of a color laser instead of a color ink jet, or monochrome laser.

The printer is described as being "compact". Well I guess that's a relative term... the printer is quite tall at a speck over 15". Depth is around 16" and width is a little over 15". It's boxy.

I found the setup on my iMac to be a piece of cake. 20 minutes from box to printing. The quick setup sheet was not particularly helpful since it used some ambiguous graphics to indicate what you were supposed to be doing at each step. Of particular concern is the opening of the front panel to remove the imaging unit assembly. This operation which is essential to the setup could be potentially disastrous if you inadvertently touch it against the "transfer unit" that is quite vulnerable because of it's position when the front cover is opened.

If you are not used to setting up equipment, it's best to take your time and read the documentation thoroughly before undertaking the setup.

After the printer was turned on for the first time, it went through some calibration and eventually spit out two pages of configuration information. What I find quite objectionable is that the printer spits out these two pages EACH TIME your printer is cycled off and on. This is a waste of paper and energy. Fortunately this "start up page" can be turned off in the menu, but it takes a bit of digging to find the option.

The printer is a little noisy during printing and initial startup, but once a print job is finished, it almost immediately goes quiet except for a very low fan sound. After about 30 minutes it will go into an energy saver mode. The time before going into energy saver mode is adjustable, from 5 minutes to 60 minutes. It takes about 15 seconds for the printer to be ready to print once it's re-awakened.

Print quality was fine but not exceptional. Of course, given the price of the printer, it's quite good. The Phaser 6130 is no speed demon however. It took 2 minutes and 45 seconds to print a 8.5 x 11 photo in "enhanced" quality over ethernet. Printing regular text documents or web pages with a mix of small graphics and text was fairly quick.

As with any printer, consumables will be an ongoing cost. The XEROX toner cartridges are rated at 2000 pages and are priced around 68.

The other color laser printer that I own is an Okidata C5500n. The Oki printer cost about $230 more than the XEROX so it's not exactly a fair comparison. But the Okidata prints faster, has marginally more expensive consumables costs but is of a noticeably better print quality. Especially in printing photos, the Okidata has more vibrant colors and is sharper. The Okidata also has duplex capability which the Phaser 6130 does not.

Pros:
-Low price
-Seems well built
-Easy setup
-both USB and Ethernet connectivity

Cons:
-A bit noisy
-No Duplex printing capability
-Lacks a bit of sharpness and vibrancy printing photos

If you're looking to move up to a color laser printer from a black and white laser, or an ink jet printer, and don't have overly demanding printing needs, this printer is a worthwhile contender. If, on the other hand, you are looking for a duplex capable printer that can handle high volume printing, this is not your printer.

I give this a solid 4 rating at its price point.

My first encounter with this printer is that it is very heavy; 45 pounds in the box and 38 out. The prepping of the printer is straight forward, but watch the video that comes with it because it makes the quick install sheet easier to understand.

This does not set up like a normal ink jet printer in which the software is installed and then the USB cable is connected. On this printer you first connect the power, and if you're not connecting it to a network then you plug in the USB cable, but don't install the software yet. If you're connecting to a network then you use the ethernet cable. Then turn it on; the first thing it does is configure the printer and print out two sheets of info. On my first printout I had a paper jam. I don't believe I overloaded the tray and it hasn't happened since. One thing it does at every start up is print out the two sheets of configurations and I'm not sure if there is any way to cancel that. If there is I haven't found it; it could always be left on standby because it doesn't use much power (5 watts).

When I finally installed the software it started looking for a network and it seemed like it took forever in trying to find one which I hadn't even set up. I tried to cancel the install but it wouldn't let me. So, I got impatient and rebooted. My fears were that it wasn't finding my Vista 64 bit OS, but after the reboot it came up with a list of 64 bit drivers. I selected the proper one and off it went; perfect installation.

Then I decided to print out an HD picture. I had plain paper in the tray so I wasn't expecting much, was I wrong! Lightening fast and what quality; WOW!!!!!! My Photoshop projects are going to be printed out with the Phaser 6130 ONLY.

There are so many things for me to learn on this printer, such as different paper types, color settings, etc. This is out first laser printer and so far we are very impressed with it (after figuring out the installation). This is not your Father's ink jet. :-)

I received this printer earlier today. It is now set up and running. I was surprised how effortless set up was. We are using Mac 10.5.4.

It comes with an instruction sheet that shows you how to remove the tapes over the toner cartridges and other packing materials. All you have to do is turn a few knobs and pull a metal piece forward, then pull out 8 yellow plastic tapes. Then you put the metal piece back and lock the knobs again. You take off a few pieces of tape, seat the toner cartridges in place (they only need to be moved forward slightly) and then you can plug it in. I connected the printer to my wireless router with an ethernet cable but you can also use a USB connection.

Then you use the installation cd and run the install program. This runs effortlessly, all you need to do is agree to the licensing agreement.

I wasn't totally sure how to set up the printer to print wireless. I'd never done that before. I tried a few things involving the printers IP addresses without success. I didn't realize I was making things far more complicated than they needed to be. Finally I just tried to print a document. I selected "Add printer" and the software loaded the drivers. That was all it took to add the printer. Now when printing I just select this printer and it prints. It is no different than using any other printer.

You can change options using the menu on the printer. I changed the waiting time till sleeping from 30 minutes to 5 minutes The default on this printer is to print an information page every time it is turned on. This was easily turned off. Everything else seems fine as it is.

I've printed documents in color and black and white, labels and a few photos. I wouldn't print photographs on this printer but it does a good job with documents that have photos.

Someone else mentioned the lights dimming when they used the printer. I haven't had that problem at all.

I am pleased with this printer. It is sturdy, with a lot of metal and is solidly built. I look forward to using it in my home business. My housemate teaches at a high school and they use the same printer in their computer lab. It has been very reliable even under a much more intense use. They change toner cartridges 3 - 4 times a year, which isn't bad given many students printing documents all day every day.

Edited to add - I've had trouble with Firefox crashing when I print. This is a known issue with Firefox NOT anything regarding this printer but while investigating it I added a RAM disc to this printer. This printer comes with 128 MB of RAM in it. You can add to the physical memory in the printer but what I did was add a RAM disc. This dedicates memory on the hard drive so the document you're printing is written to the hard drive and then prints. This has greatly improved the Firefox problem (which I think is a Firefox issue) and speeded printing. So I would recommend that you add a RAM disc. Open the printer info, select "info" and then driver. Check the check box for RAM disc.

The Xerox Phaser 6130/N Color Laser Printer is a very nice color laser printer with a sleek durable body and a cool functional design. The performance is very good and the quality of print-outs is also good for most general color printing needs. Those with more specific specialized needs, such as high volume or large format photo quality printing, will probably want to look at some alternatives. Still, among general use color laser printers the 6130 is a very attractive option.

Features, Upgrades, Service

In terms of speeds this unit is very fast compared to inkjets and color laser printers, but many black and white laser printers are faster. So if your primary needs are black and white printing and speed, you may want to consider a B&W laser printer. If you will be printing more than occasionally in color, the speed benefits of color printing far outweigh the few extra seconds of wait time on black and white print-outs.

The internal memory is certainly enough for general printing needs. However, 128 MB will not be adequate for those printing large color presentations. Power users will want to upgrade immediately. If you purchase your own compatible memory you will save some money versus purchasing through Xerox.

The toner cartridges are somewhat expensive, but not more so than most laser printer cartridges. The high cost is mostly off-set by the longer useful life. Unlike your inkjet printer, you should be able to go a while before having to change toner. The fact that the cartridges are pre-loaded is great, and the placement of the access door on the side is a GREAT design feature that makes accessing and changing toner much easier than printers from competing brands.

Installation

The included instructions guide novices in setting up your printer, changing the toner cartridges and other basics. I think the instructions are adequate is somewhat minimalist. You have to look at the steps carefully. Setting up your network connection could have included more information, but most users will only need the default setup. While there is a USB connection option as well, it seems like kind of a shame to not get the benefits of the network setup. Hooking this printer up to your wireless router is quite easy.

The driver setup program needs the printer to be online in order to be completed. You have to complete the printer setup beforehand to ensure that it has an IP and is accessible over the network. After installation, you can register your printer online for warrantee and support needs.

The Competition

While the printer size is not the most compact, and the weight is quite heavy, compared to other color laser printers this stacks up well in those areas. The HP Color LaserJet 1600and HP Color LaserJet 3600n are much taller and bigger overall. And while the Samsung CLP-300N Network-ready Color Laser Printer is smaller, this Phaser isn't much bigger and has much better quality prints. Those with a small business or home office will find size to be acceptable given the performance.

Conclusion

This is a very nice performing color laser printer at an acceptable price. It's not the cheapest or the most expensive. While the size is acceptable, it may be large for very small workstations. Many people will need an all-in-one printer that also offers scanning and copying functionality. In this price range, the models that have that capacity are mostly black and white printers, though some offer color scanning. So if you need color printing, this may definitely be the way to go. For general printing needs, color power point decks or the like, this is a very good alternative for you.

Enjoy!

I purchased this printer about a month ago through an Amazon reseller and it took about five days to arrive. The packaging is really good and it's relatively easy to unbox. The installation instructions are the best I've ever seen with a printer (the click-through videos show you exactly what you need to do to get it ready to print). Installing the drivers and adding the printer is a snap once it's connected to your network. It took less than an hour from the time it arrived to the time I printed my first page.

Unfortunately, it took less than a day for my first paper jam to occur. It has jammed frequently and it seems to be completely random when it jams. Sometimes I've printed 50 page documents without a hiccup and other times I just try to print a 5 page document which ends up taking 15 minutes to clear the rollers, try again, clear the rollers, and try again. I've probably had to throw away a couple dozen sheets of crinkled up paper this past month from all the paper jams. I've tried opening it up and reseating the imager and the toner cartridges; all fruitless attempts at preventing future jams.

Also, this printer is pretty loud. If you are used to a nearly silent ink jet, you'll be surprised at how much noise this thing creates when it's cranking out 50 page reports.

One other note, this printer is rather large for a desk. If you don't have a considerable amount of desk space or a table to place it on, you might want to measure before buying one.

Overall, the Xerox Phaser 6130 gets 3 out of 5 stars. When this printer actually prints and doesn't jam, the quality is pretty good. It is easy to unbox and setup; the price is pretty competitive too. However all the jams and the loud printing takes down what could have been a great score.