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Day one with the new printer is done and overall I’m very pleased. While I bought the printer from my local Apple reseller, TRG in Aurora, it was delivered direct from Xerox by Purolator. The driver got the box to the front hall and I took it from there. The printer weighs about 60 pounds so once it was on the stand it was simply connecting power and Ethernet. Then I loaded the wax ink blocks into the proper trays (impossible to mess this up) and fired it up. I then put the install CD in the Mac Pro and launched the installer. It discovered the printer on the network without issue and installed the drivers and configured the connection. The test print failed from the installer software but one launched from the print queue directly worked perfectly. I then ran Apple’s Software Update and it fed me new drivers automatically.

The printer is nearly silent unless printing and consumes little power at idle. It generates a bit of heat because it keeps the wax liquid, but no worse than a colour laser. Print quality is incredible, better than any colour laser I’ve seen using toner and nearly as tight as a photographic inkjet printer. Paper handling so far has been trouble free.

What is amazing is how fast this thing is. I have been using an older Minolta QMS Magicolor 2210 for a few years and while it’s been a good unit it’s starting to go through parts. I was becoming frustrated with it because graphics rich PDFs or Keynote presentations were taking a long time to print. I ran a 20 page analyst report, double sided, through the Xerox and had beautiful rich output in under a minute. The colours are bright and snappy, the tables are sharp and the charts just pop.

The unit uses wax blocks with excellent longevity in four colours, black, cyan, magenta and yellow. You buy block kits like toner. The colour kits include 3 blocks and the black kit comes with six blocks. Each kit is about $140 from Xerox (cheaper from Amazon) and delivers several thousand pages. Xerox posts all in prices per page of from 2.9 cents for a business letter to 25 cents for a full blown graphics page. Their models include all the consumables not just the ink, so a fairly accurate overall costing in my opinion. Prints last well but could fade in sunlight according to my research.

The only issue I ran into with the unit had to do with the Windows 7 driver install. I tried the install both from the CD and from Xerox’s Web site. It took a really long time to discover the printer and when it installed the management console something caused the printer to freeze. Since this happened more than once and only when I tried to get the Windows 7 drivers working, I think that the problem is related to the driver. I’ll try again without installing the console since it seems of little use anyway. It’s not a big deal for me because we’re finally all Mac here at the castle, except for the test machines needed for Windows and Linux.

This is only the first day so stay tuned for further updates, but so far I’m very pleased.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 17th, 2010 at 10:38 pm and is filed under Macintosh, OS X, Peripherals, Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.