Xerox's Phaser 7750 Color Laser Printer Sets the Bar

By David Em

September 19, 2005

(Xerox's Phaser 7750 Color Laser Printer Sets the Bar :  Page 1 of 1 )

Sophisticated color documents are suddenly ubiquitous. Every day I see press releases, reviewer guides, and other short-run print materials that in the past were printed in black and white, but now feature splashes of color on every page.

As digital color quality goes up and cost-per-page goes down, graphic designers, ad agencies, and in-house art departments increasingly produce complex color projects that used to be jobbed out to third parties.

I've spent the last couple weeks testing Xerox's 7750DN, a color laser printer that offers compelling value to these demanding communities with a combination of image quality, media flexibility, speed, and industrial-strength reliability.

Scoping the Field

The 7750 line ranges from $5,600 for the base unit to a little over $9,000 for the top-of-the-line DXF model that adds a finisher for staggered stacking and stapling. I tested the 7750DN version with 512MB of RAM, a 20 GB disk, and four additional paper trays. This package runs around $8,000. An EX server version with an EFI Fiery RIP costs about $20,000.

These figures aren't chump change. However, neither is a color printing bill at Kinko's. For example, Kinko's charges from $.69 up to $1.89 for a single duplexed (two-sided) color page, so one copy of a 100-sheet document on decent paper can cost well over a hundred bucks.

Inexpensive color lasers aren't a viable option for this kind of work. You can pick up a bare-bones model (no duplex, no extra paper tray) that delivers good image quality for between $500 and $1000, but the capacity of their consumables is abysmal and replacement toners are very expensive.

For example, using the completely unrealistic industry standard measurement for estimating color usage at 5 percent per page, inexpensive color lasers rate their toner sets at 1500 pages. I printed a single copy of a 150-page document with a lot of color on Konica Minolta's $500 2430DL (click BYTE.com > BYTE Media Lab > 2005