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.