Customer Reviews

Xerox Phaser 6180/DN Color Laser Printer

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I've had this printer for 3 weeks now. So far, I find print quality very good for this price range. Colors are fairly accurate out of the box although a bit on the dark side . This can be adjusted via driver and results are great. Color lasers aren't supposed to good at photos, but give this printer some glossy photo laser paper and you'll be very impressed with the results. Not as good as an injet but much better that what I expected for a laser. Resolution of photos is not quite as good as color lasers with 1200dpi print but is still shows a lot of detail. Photos on plain paper tend to look faded as the toner doesn't have the shiny/glossy look you find on some color lasers. Text and graphics are excellent as most reviews will tell you.

Duplexer works great and text and graphics print out quickly. Photos can take a while (about 2 minutes for an 8.5x11 photo) and I'd suggest upgrading another 1GB of RAM. Don't bother looking for Xerox memory. Go to the Kingston or Crucial websites to look up their compatible memory. Much much cheaper ($40 vs $400 for xerox)!!!

Only thing I can't judge for now is cost of consumables. Xerox seems to charge a bit more for toner than others but their cost per page estimates sound reasonable.

Overall a very good color laser for the price.

For one color page with 5% coverage, it takes anywhere from 4-10 minutes to process. Printing is lightning quick, once it finishes processing. I thought I change from Spooling to Print-Directly-To-Printer, but its still very slow. The duplex module usually goes in the back, this one goes under the transfer belt and when it prints on two sides..... Keep your fingers away from the output tray unless you want to have a huge paper cut. It grabs the paper back in.

A little tip for you! If you are printing a nice photograph, tell the printer to flip on the "long" side of the page rather then the short, it will run the paper 3 times over, so the photograph is nice and rich in color ......

It's HUUUUUUUUUUGE, weighs a good 60 pounds and is somewhat user-friendly. I think Xerox makes better copiers then printers. My little black & white laser is so tiny compared to grand-daddy Xerox.

I like the image quality that this printer puts out. It doesn't take to long for a job to print out. I had trouble printing on some laser photo paper, I don't know if I had a setting wrong or not but it was like part of the image wouldn't stick to the paper. A big issue I have with this phaser is the prices of the toner cartridges. Paying to replace all the toner cartridges will break your bank. The high capacity go for around $200 per color. The normal capacity go for about $100. I have the normal capacity in mine and it seems to go pretty quick. Make sure when you are doing your research on a laser color printer check and see how much it will cost you for toner.

With a $[...] instant rebate by Xerox, this printer is selling for $[...] directly by Xerox. I have seen this machine selling for as low as $[...] with free UPS Ground shipping from at least one very large and reputable online merchant.
Anyway, if you are in the market to spend $[...] on a color printer, do not even bother reading any reviews, just get the Xerox 6180DN - unless you know for a fact that you can get a better machine than this one for $[...] or less. Because of the rebate, supplies of this printer are beginning to run low.
My laser printer experience has been only with HP and Brother monochrome devices going back about 15 years. Therefore, I am not able to compare the Xerox 6180DN directly with another color laser printer. However, I have a lot of experience with photography (medium and large format film as well as the current 35mm full frame digital SLRs) and inkjet printers by Canon and Epson.
So this is what happened immediately after setting up the printer with a PowerPC Mac dual 1GHz with 1.5MB Ram running OS 10.4.11: the first print was run with the Phaser 6180 profile that came on the disk with the printer. The print was on plain paper and the colors were unacceptable (too red) and dark. I changed some settings within the Print dialog, but still there was little to no improvement. After wasting a few sheets of paper and not getting anywhere, I went on Xerox website and found directions for correction in the FAQ about colors being off. The only problem was that the parameter that they were asking to access was no where to be found under "Copies & Pages" in the Print dialog box. After scratching my head a bit more, I purged the printer driver from the Printer Setup Utility and reinstalled the printer software. And guess what, the missing parameter showed up. It is called Printer Features and located in the Print dialog box under the pull-down menu of Copies & Pages.
Now, I was able to make better prints. I still had not achieved quite the correct color yet. Also, there was this faint cyan color that was coating the whole page. At this point I was in less than happy mood because I had spent way too much time to get to this point (almost three hours). It was time to create a custom printer profile. At the best setting, it takes over half-hour to create the profile. It was this half hour that I was trying to save by trying to print as I was. As they say, haste makes waste.
Anyway, it took me 40 minutes to create a custom profile for this printer and the first print that came out with this profile was right on the money! In fact, I had an inkjet version of this print laying nearby and the Xerox 6180DN print had a greater punch to it. When both prints were placed at far enough of a viewing distance, the Xerox print had better colors! Without scrutiny, it was the better looking print. Of course, at close examination, the Xerox print was not as sharp. This is to be expected. In fact, I had the same file output on the Xerox Phaser 7760 (this machine is 1200 dpi by 1200 dpi and costs $[...] after $[...] rebate), and the picture is only very slightly sharper than the 6180DN. All in all, I am pleasantly surprised with the quality output from this machine.
The profile that Xerox provides (Phaser 6180) is not good at all. On the other hand, if one does not possess or have access to a decent output device profiling hardware/software, what does one do? Well, I played around a bit and found that Photoshop 5 default CMYK profile that is bundled with Photoshop (I am using Photoshop CS3, and a generic CMYK profile may be bundled with other software packages as well) worked well also. I was able to achieve very decent output by using the following settings on my system (remember color can be subjective): Photoshop Manages Colors; Photoshop 5 Default CMYK; In Print dialog box, under Copies & Pages, in Printer Features, in Print Quality/Color, set the followng: Image Quality: Enhanced; Brightness: Brighter (+3); Color Correction: None (this is very important); Adjust color Balance: try it unchecked first. In Color Balance C, set Low, Medium, and High Density each to Lighter (-2). In Color Balance K, set Low, Medium and High Density each to Darker (+1). In Media Handling, set the Paper Type to the type of paper that you are using. Leave parameters not mentioned at their default settings.
I know some people are not happy with the speed of this machine when printing graphics. I am unable to comment on this one because I do not have any experience with another color laser printer that is similarly priced. For regular text though, this printer spits out the first page of print very fast. It takes one minute and forty-three seconds for the printer to output one copy of a one-and-half megabyte JPEG file. The actual printing is quick; it is the processing that takes place that uses majority of the time. I have the extra 1GB of RAM installed. If there is a speed difference without the extra RAM, I did not check. Besides, laser printers are not really meant to print photographic quality pictures to frame or hang on the wall. The colors are not very permanent. I was testing the picture printing capability of this machine only because photography happens to be a passion of mine.
I did consider the Xerox 8560DN. However, I could not pin down Xerox with a straight and consistent answer about how much of the solid ink gets wasted if and when the printer gets turned off (electricity outage?). Different agents gave me varying quantities. Also, personally, I did not like the glossy look of the output on a business form.
The bottom line is that the output quality of text is as good as it should be from a 600 by 600dpi machine. With the change of a few settings, the colors can be made to come out subdued or vibrant.
I am giving this machine five stars because I could not find any faults for $[...]. At its regular selling price of $[...], however, I would have to find out and compare the graphics output speed with other machines selling for similar amount. Even then, I cannot imagine that you would find another color laser printer that would be drastically better in the graphics color output department.
The cost per page of this machine is not significantly different than others on the market, if you believe the figures listed by Xerox online.
Hope some of the information was of use to the reader.

The color prints come out fine; the printer has very little memory, so you'll have to wait for a while. Toner is expensive. Duplexing is a real bonus and the purchase price is low. If I had a second chance, I would have shopped around more.

I've had the 6180/DN for several weeks and it works great. Network setup was plug n play. I'd buy it again in a heart beat.

Note: I did not purchase the DN

I purchased a new Xerox Phaser 6180 for less than $500 with free delivery from an online merchant. I use it mainly for B & W and color text in my small business office. Text prints very fast. Graphics take longer to process, but I think it would still be faster the ink jet printer it replaced. I'm 100% satisfied with the features, quality, and Xerox customer service. Its build-quality and design seem much more professional than most of the other brand name printers that seem more like toys when compared the 6180. This printer also has a Parallel port. I highly recommend it.