Phaser 8400

For the past 3 years our company has relied on the Xerox Phaser 850DX. It's a fantastic color printer that makes use of "solid ink". Solid ink is marketing talk for wax. You put these cool little blocks of wax and off you go. No mess, incredibly easy. Very low maintainence.

The quality of the Phaser 850DX from 2000 was really good for the time. Screenshots, which were our big use for it, looked very good, for the time. Over the years though, it has developed a minute leak that caused images to have too much magenta in them.  We were so satisfied with the Xerox Phaser 850DX that we naturally wanted to look at getting their "latest/greatest" version.

So 4 or so years have passed and so we bought the 8400. It's about $1000 and it prints much much faster than the older version. It has an even easier setup than the 850DX did and a few other ergonomic enhancements. But on the downside, the print quality is...exactly the same. It's just faster.

I was really hoping it would print even sharper images. And so in that department, we're still looking for a printer that isn't an injket that can print screenshots on regular paper that are magazine quality. The 8400 does it pretty close and I'm sure most new users of it would be suitably impressed. But I was really expecting it to have made some progress in the image quality department in the past few years. Good quality, but no better than 4 years ago.

So do I recommend it? Yes. It prints incredibly fast. It's much cheaper to maintain than a laser or injket printer. It's very low hassle. And it's definitely good enough for most people's needs in the quality department either. But don't expect magazine-like quality from it. It's pretty close but not quite there.