Laser Color, Inexpensive and Quick

Smaller, moderately priced, and networkable, Xerox's C55 laser will bring color printing to many offices.

Russell Kay

In 1984, Hewlett-Packard revolutionized office paperwork with a $3500 laser printer that fit on a desktop and produced 4 high-quality pages per minute at 300 dots per inch. We may be on the verge of a new revolution, but this time it's being led by Brand X. The new DocuPrint C55 from Xerox is a $3500 networkable desktop laser that gives great color at 3 ppm and 600 dpi.

First, some specs.The C55 is a compact cube occupying only 306 square inches of desktop--less than two-thirds the footprint of color lasers from HP, Lexmark, and Tektronix. It's a dense cube, though, at a surprisingly hefty 90 pounds. It prints at 3 ppm in full color, 12 ppm in black and white, a nd 6 ppm in a special two-color "Fast Blue" mode. Consumables cost a mere dime per color page, and a draft mode prints pastel pages at 5 cents each.

The C55 can use legal-size paper. It automatically detects and adjusts color for transparencies. The standard 30 MB of RAM is upgradable to 70 MB. An included printer cable hooks up to the printer's new mini-Centronix connector.

Printers don't usually include a floppy drive, but there's one (called a "media server") here. Print from your application to a PRN file using the C55 driver and put that file on a floppy, and you can take the disk to the printer. The front-panel LCD lets you select filenames for printing.

The MP model I tested adds PostScript (with Mac, OS/2, and Unix drivers), an Ethernet card, and network software. PostScript also adds continuous-tone pri nting and a "Fax Friendly" mode that converts colors to black hatching.

Nothing but Net

The C55MP was designed for networking, and the setup CD includes everything needed. However, the NetWare instructions fail to note that you need to run the 32-bit NetWare client , even for NetWare 3.1x LANs. Nice for LAN users is a "Hold Job" feature that lets you walk down the hall and change paper before beginning printing. All C55s have an embedded HTTP server that allows remote monitoring--even temperature, humidity, voltages, and toner levels.

No color printer does it all. Xerox's DocuPrint C55 offers an intriguing middle-ground option between the big, costly, high-end color lasers and the small, slow, value-priced ink-jets. Time will tell if this new Xerox design is really the spiritual successor to the original LaserJet. But it's one dandy printer.

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Where to Find

DocuPrint C55MP...................$4.999
 with PostScript and 8-M
B network card ($4500 street price)

C55 standard model................$3,999
 ($3500 street price)
(30 MB of RAM standard on both)
Xerox Corp.
Rochester, NY
Phone:    716-425-5230
Internet: 
http://www.xerox.com/

Enter 996 on Inquiry Card.

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Ratings

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Key: ***** Outstanding, **** Very Good, *** Good, ** Fair, * Poor

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Built for Hard Work

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No 90-pound weakling, this wonder of a desktop color laser is inexpensive to buy and to run, and it's made for networking.

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Russell Kay is a BYTE technical editor who's been printing things all his life. You can reach him at russellk@bix.com .