Bottom Line:

If you need a good printer with high quality of manufacture, not just prints, and if you need a company you can trust not to fraudulently over-charge you for toner or ink then the Xerox solid ink Phaser line of printers is probably for you.

Aren't They All Using "Smart Chips" These Days?

Well, all the inkjet and laserjet manufacturers are using smart chips and it is a darned shame because they have all but completely lost the trust and confidence of the consumer. I hope Xerox is able to extend solid ink products to include more lower end consumer grade devices.

Solid ink? Huh?

That is what I said the first time I heard of it. Yep, solid ink...check it out the following URL:
http://www.office.xerox.com/solid-ink/enus.html
I selected the least expensive multifunction solid ink device that Xerox makes: The 8560 MFP. I did this for several reasons. The biggest reason stems from the terrible experiences I had with the HP Laserjet 2840. After being cheated out of lots of expensive toner and suffering through the overall poor printer quality, I began a hunt for a printer that took cartridges without any clueless "smart chips." Unfortunately, there weren't any of those manufactureres remaining. But wait, then I discovered solid ink products from Xerox and more specifically their Phaser product line. Some of the Phaser printers are conventional laser toner printers so you must pay attention to what kind of ink it takes to know what you are getting.

The Good (first the good stuff)

Setup was super easy and took less than 5 minutes and the product even included a number of video training segmants for installation and training from setup to configuration and device management. In addition to the brain-dead graphical fold out chart of step by step instructions detailing connections and cables with images that is included with most printers, Xerox of course had to outdo all the competition. The Phaser 8560 comes with that as well as viewable setup videos segmented out into the various steps so you can navigate the video segments just like a web page in a browser and the video includes rotating 3D models of the printer that are zoomed in and out to illistrate navigating around the exterior of the printer. Most printers will provide a close-up shot of some area of the exterior leaving you to search the exterior for that secret panel that has already been removed or opened in the close up photo. The videos are great and illistrate *exactly* where and how to get at ports, jacks, and trays to configure the printer. When did your last HP, Epson, Lexmark, Dell, or anyone other purchase do that for you?

Xerox has a rebate program where they will send you free solid ink after you make a purchase. The rebate program is awsome and has no forms to fill out. There is one web page with some fields for your name and address so they know where they are sending the ink but after that they want a fax of your order (sent to you via email from where you order the unit) and a fax of the startup page the printer spits out when you power it up. Xerox even gives you a link to the header page to use when faxing the two documents I just mentioned back to them and the header page they provide has their fax number right on it. Super easy, super simple, super company. These are to printers, what Apple has been to the MP3 player...you actually get value for your money!

I had one very minor issue that required a support call to Xerox. I want to compare this with the support experiece I had with HP. When I needed to contact HP it took in excess of 5 voice menu navigation actions and then I was on hold for over 20 minutes before finally speaking to someone whos accent I could not understand very well. The quality of the connection on the line was also bad which only compounded the problem with the accent. Also with HP support, I was asked to go through countless irrelevant troubleshooting exercises that I already knew had nothing to do with my problem. That took even longer (another 45 minutes or so) and the support representative was somewhat agumentative which I understand is common from having discussed the experience with other HP product owners. I first called the folks I bought the printer from and they gave me the Xerox support number. I called it and needed to only press one number to get where I wanted to go. I was on hold less than 15 seconds and after providing a brief description of the problem along with my contact information including address, I was told a local representative would be calling me the next morning. Hardly: 5 minutes later the phone rang and it was the local representative. We clarified a few points over the description I had given to the call center just a few minutes earlier. He told me he would have the part for me the following morning and made an appointment to come by and replace it. No argument, no silly diagnostic procedures that are a waste of time and irrelevant to the problem, just great on site service from a competent and proficient english speaking professional. Wow, it is amazing the kind of service a company can provide when it makes a quality product! In the absence of a quality product I can imagine the number of support calls going through the roof while the quality of those calls as volume increases goes right through the floor and straight to h... OK I won't go there.

I can not say enough good things about the solid ink. If you are like me trying to restore your self esteem after having been blatently robbed by one or more printer manufacturers expiring or emptying chips on cartridges before they are really empty or trying, also like me, to refill your own messy inkjet or laserjet cartridges and replacing or resetting idiotic "smart" chips then you will appreciate this solid ink concept as much as I do. Not only can you always visibly see what ink you are running low on (see the above URL for a photo of the clear plastic panels where the ink is placed so you can see it even after it is in the printer) but there is no cartridge to even mess with. Is that great or what? The stuff is not toxic, does not rub off on your fingers when you take it out of the package for all 4 cubes of all colors together the packaging itself produces less waste than the cardboard box packaging used with a single laserjet cartridge, let alone the other 3 required to actually make a color laserjet printer work. The inkjet cartridges are a little better but still with the solid ink there is no cartridge at all! The ink on the page looks great too and it doesn't even smudge or smear if it gets wet like many of the inkjet printers do.

Speed, oh yes...speed. The Phaser 8560 is one fast printer. It will spit out an entire page in under a second. You can hear a quick zzzzip sound and the page is sitting in the tray. Yes, it is just that fast. Even with wildly complex color filled pages.

The web interface and the menu driven interface on the front panel of the printer are very feature rich and the 8560 is upgradable like crazy with lots of super high capacity trays to mount the printer on and duplex options, and high capacity auto document feaders and all kinds of stuff. On the front there are options for lightening or darkening the image, enlarging or reducing it, output quality, type of document, mode of color, and more. It is like the feature set found on $20,000 heavy duty office document solution!

The drivers...ooh the drivers! You will be amazed. On the HP Laserjet 2840, not only were 64-bit drivers non-existant and completely dysfunctional, but the USB port did not even function. I wound up relying upon the network printing capabilities of the printer and hooking the printer up via its ethernet port (I needed to print from multiple computers without the aid of a painful windows print share anyway) and even then I lost the functionality of the scanner because it was not supported when used from the ethernet print server (as most are not.) So, not only does Xerox provide full 64 bit operating system support but the drivers provide full, that's right, full support for all, that's right, all printer functions over both the USB as well as the ethernet port. The system even includes a convenient scanner that will scann the network for the printer just in case the printer grabbed an IP address dynamically from your local DHCP server. Heck, I would not be the least bit surprised if the driver scanned the network for the printer each time it moved IP addresses offering users full dynamic IP addressing with your network printing. I did not even check because I have a static IP range with reservations already reserved for devices like this and it is working just fine so I only obtained the printers MAC address and then setup a DHCP reservation for it so it will get the same IP address every time. That way I do not need to statically configure the printer. Anyway, again I can not say enough good things about the seamless installation of the drivers on both 32 bit and 64 bit operating systems.

If you are thinking "yeah but the price is kind of expensive!" Let me put it this way. The HP Laserjet 2840 I bought cost $900 and over $450 dollar in replacement cartriges while sending 60% of the toner back to HP so they can cheat someone else of another 60% of the cartridge after slapping a new chip on the same stupid cartridge. By the time you take into account the hundreds of dollars you are paying HP while they are deceiving you the Xerox costs less than 50% of the HP unit. At least with the Xerox, you get local on-site support for a year from a true professional who is actually concerned about the quality of the products he (or she) supporting...no really, I could hear it in his voice when I talked to him on the phone and he was genuinely concerned that I might think Xerox had a crappy printer...and you can understand the language they are speaking as well! Add in not having to spend hours of time dealing with bad USB hardware that made it right through the quality assurance process at HP along with crappy drivers that run super slow, hang, make other USB devices you have connected to same bus fail, and other not to trivial annoyances and you have already made up the additional cost in improved productivity as a result of not having to change the diapers of the baby printer you are babysitting while it spits up all over your desk.

OK, Now The Bad (Hey, it's not a perfect world)

Suprisingly, I would have expected a quality product to work out of the box. It did and initially I thought the LCD display that allows you to configure the printer and shows status while in operation did not have a back light which is a real bummer because those back lights behind the LCD panel make a world of difference! Anyway while I was configuring the unit with a bright overhead light, I noticed the dislpay start to flicker as I would press on the menu navigation and selection buttons. After feeling around the plast molding surrounding the LCD panel, I discovered that there was a loose connection of some kind inside it. If I apply gentle pressure to the plastic molding near the upper right hand corner of the LCD display then I can get the back light to stay on but releasing the pressure on this spot of the plast molding causes it to go off. Also, it will momentarily come on while pressing the menu buttons. The functionality of the printer was not impacted and given the great service (described above) more than made up for it.

The time for this unit to warm up from being either powered down or in a power save state is very lengthy. It can take as long as 2 to 3 full minutes for the 8560 to warm up enough to print. I suspect it needs time to heat that solid ink up to a high enough temperature that it can be used. The default time out for the unit to enter a power save state is 4 hours. I thought that was high and now I understand why it is 4 hours. If people are around and wanting to printer, they will not want to wait for 3 minutes every time they need one page. My situation is perhaps a little more unique. This printer is used by me for my very very small business and very lightly used by the kids for homework and my wife for some of the work she does. I am not interested in absorbing the power bill after letting the printer keep that ink hot all day long day in and day out so I turned the time out all the way down to the minimum setting of 30 minutes and we just put up with the warm up delay. The great support and service, solid ink, rich feature set, and high quality without getting bent over and screwed on the ink are more than enough positives for me to overlook the lengthy warm up time.

The unit is large and while slightly deeper than the HP Laserjet 2840, the width and height are nearly the same. Thankfully it fit into the same space as the lasejer 2840 but make sure you scrutinize the physical dimensions on the Xerox web site and have enough room for this thing because the pictures make it look deceptively smaller than it is in real life.