Xerox Brings Low-Cost Color Printers to the Midmarket

Printing, scanning and copying are mission-critical functions for small to medium-size businesses, and the ability to print in color can give them an edge at a time where businesses large and small are struggling to find new customers and fighting fiercely to hold on to old ones. Xerox’s Phaser 6128MFP and the Phaser 6280 color laser printers might offer SMBs a reason to upgrade, even as appliance budgets face cuts.

“With the advent of color, as businesses now are seeking different ways to be competitive and save costs, bringing in a color printer is a great way to save costs,” said Xerox director of product marketing, desktop products, Robin Wessel. “Both of these products are very affordably prices and at the same time extremely powerful. We’re looking at a product that three or four years ago would have been $1,000 to $1,500.”

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The Phaser 6128MFP is priced at $599 and copies, scans and faxes, and prints up to 12 pages per minute in color, and 16 ppm in black and white. The Phaser 6280, priced at $549, is a single-function printer that offers up to 26-ppm color print speeds and a first-page-out time as fast as 10 seconds.

In addition to speed, both printers also offer environmentally friendly components that reduce waste. “First off, both of these products meet the latest Energy Star standards—power consumption is very efficient,” said Wessel. “One of the things we focused on was how much waste these devices produce.”

He said printers consume enormous amounts of material in their production, so Xerox focused on ways to reduce the number of components used in the appliances. “With the 6128, we were able to use a very efficient engine architecture that results in extremely low waste,” said Wessel, including taking the plastic drums and metal components and combining them into a single toner unit designed to last the lifetime of the product. “In total we’ve reduced the amount of waste by 90 percent,” he said.

In addition, both products use Emulsion Aggregate High Grade (EA-HG) toner with smaller, more consistent toner particles that Wessel said enable higher resolution and sharper image quality. The printers are also part of the Xerox Green World Alliance, a worldwide initiative to encourage customers to recycle or dispose of supplies in a manner that minimizes impact to the environment.

The Phaser 6280 features a variety of tools to help manage color, such as True Adobe PostScript3, PANTONE color-approved simulations, Xerox color correction technology and 600-by-600-by-4 dpi that delivers 16 shades of color per pixel. The Phaser 6128MFP includes a scan to e-mail feature that sends e-mail via a wide variety of networks and a LAN Fax, which sends faxes directly from the computer.

Wesser said he understands that in such “uncertain times” getting SMBs to part with their money will be a challenge, but said he is confident in Xerox’s ability to reach midmarket companies. “I don’t want to speculate about our competitors, but we are a Tier 1 type supplier, someone who is going to be around for some time,” he said. “Other companies have looked at color printing as a part-time occupation. Printing is our business.”