Printer to print your own tabloid in color

Printer to print your own tabloid in color

Zatni Arbi, Columnist, Jakarta, zatni@cbn.net.id

When I was offered to test drive a new printer from Fuji Xerox,
its Phaser 7300N, I just said "OK. When can you send it to my
place?"

I had missed the product launch in Jakarta in January, so I
was not prepared to see how huge the printer was when it was
delivered to my tiny little house the next day. It required two
men to carry it from the van into my living room. Once it was
placed on the floor, it would remain there-until PT Harrisma
Agung Jaya, its distributor for Indonesia, sent their people to
pick it up.

The monstrous, 149 lbs Phaser 7300N is definitely not for
personal use. Like the Phaser 6200 that I reviewed last year, we
can connect our computer to this tabloid-sized color printer via
a USB, parallel or Ethernet cable. Fuji Xerox recommends using
the Ethernet connection. We can connect it through a router or
directly using a crossover UTP cable. A crossover UTP cable is
normally used if you would like to connect two computers in a
peer-to-peer mode using Ethernet.

Like before, Harrisma only supplied me with the four ink
cartridges, a power cord and two CDs. There was no manual, no
quick installation guide. I had to figure out on my own how to
use this printer.

So I redirected the long UTP cable that was used to connect my
daughter's PC to my router. She was not at home, so I was able to
do that. I plugged the power cable to the printer, and turned it
on. There was only one single indicator lamp, and it blinked all
the time. I knew I had to fill the tray with paper. But, where
was the tray?

It turned out the tray was at the bottom of the unit. It was a
large tray, and it took me some time to figure out where to stack
my letter-size paper. After I had placed the paper, I pushed the
tray back in and the green light stopped blinking.

Now what should I do next? I remembered that in Phaser 6200
the manual could be printed. So I checked the 7300's menu. Also
like the 6200, the characters on the small LCD were clear enough
for me to read. I found the menu: "Print Help Guide". The manual
was three-pages, but it did not explain much beyond general
issues such as replacing consumables and resolving paper jams.

* Setting IP Address

I decided to just try my luck. The Driver Installation utility
asked for the IP address of the printer. It was 192.168.102.30. I
typed in this address, but the utility told me that it was unable
to find any printer on the network with this address. I got a
little nervous, because I knew I could not move the printer
closer to my PC for a direct connection. I went back to the
printer, found the "Print Connection Setup Page". The secret was
that I had to give the printer an IP address very similar to the
network card on my PC. So I gave it the same IP address and
changed only the last digit from 1 to 2. Then I went back to my
PC and ran the install utility again, put the address and bingo!
I was surprised to see that my first page was already being
printed when I stepped out of my study into the living room.

Speed is certainly one of the strong points of this printer.
It can print 30 pages per minute (ppm) in color or 37 ppm in
black and white. One of the ingredients for its speed was the 500
MHz processor. My review unit came with 192 MB of RAM, and it can
be expanded to 512 MB. The printer's maximum print resolution is
600 x 2400 DPI. It can print on a variety of media-including
transparencies -- and in different sizes -- from postcard to 12 x
18 inch and 12 x 36 inch (banner) sizes. It intelligently detects
the type of media being used and even the thickness of the paper
stock.

What about printing cost? According to Fuji Xerox, the cost of
printing an A4 newsletter with around 39 percent coverage, which
would be the most likely use of a color printer, would be around
US$0.23. A black and white business letter would cost around
US$0.02. The printer itself will cost your organization from
US$3,500 and up (U.S. price), depending on configuration.

Print quality is very good, especially for solid colors. Text
is crisp. It has 136 Postscript and 54 PCL fonts in its ROM. We
cannot compare it to a high-end desktop photo printer, of course,
but a scanned photo of my daughter, which was taken when she was
five years old, came out very beautifully.

The only thing that scared me a bit was that, during the
driver installation, my PC suddenly informed me that the driver
had not been certified for compatibility with Windows XP.
However, as I was actually planning to reformat my entire hard
disk, I ignored the warning and it turned out that the driver
worked fine.

But you should not do this if you are not planning to do what
I was going to do, because an incompatible printer driver could
really wreak havoc with your applications. If you encounter this
situation, just stop. Download the latest version of the driver
from the manufacturer's Web site, or ask the distributor to
supply you with it.

Phaser 7300 is a workgroup printer that does its job very
well. If you need a fast color printer that can be shared among 5
to 25 users, you should take a close look at this one.