Speed, quality and productivity with affordable Phaser 8500 colour printer

Speed, quality and productivity are key differentiators in modern business and these attributes are brought into play with a competitively priced Xerox colour printer that produces 24 pages a minute in full colour with the first page out in just six seconds.

Aimed at the SMB market, the Phaser 8500 is an A4 solid ink printer that networks on the 10/100 Ethernet standard and sustains a duty cycle of 85 000 pages a month, according to Philippa dal Medico, line of business head, channel at Xerox distributor, the JSE-listed Square One Solutions Group Limited.

"Small and medium businesses demand affordable solutions that do not sacrifice quality and features," says Dal Medico. "In today's business environment speed is essential with shared printing resources. This printer delivers speed along with exceptional colour quality and reliability and has true Adobe and Postscript 3 as standard."

The Phaser 8500 has a powerful 600MHz PowerPC processor with up to 256Mb of memory. The 8550 model can be upgraded to an impressive 1GB of memory. The 8550 model also has an optional 20GB hard disk. Standard features include a fast colour mode that uses less ink but maintains quality as well as an analysis tool that allows management to monitor usage and control printing activities.

Time-saving features include installation at the touch of a button, an intuitive printer driver that displays print options from all trays and applications, an embedded Web server that allows management, configuration and troubleshooting from the desktop and a support centre feature that provides easy electronic access to all user documentation, tools and utilities.

The 8550 features a host of productivity features. "Personal Print" creates personal mailboxes for individuals on the printer's hard dive where processed print jobs can be stored and can be printed on demand via the control panel. "Secure Print" protects confidential documents by requiring a password entry at the printer before printing. Both models support "N-Up Printing" that allows more than one page to be printed on a single sheet, a feature that conserves ink and paper. Other features include a text watermark for draft or confidential documents, full collation, job pipelining, automatic two-sided printing without having to reload the sheets, and booklet printing.

"Colour demands attention on business documents and gets better results from prospective customers," says Dal Medico. "The Phaser 8500 solid ink technology provides truer, more saturated and consistent images on virtually any printing surface and an automatic colour correction feature applies the best print method to each element on a page to ensure the best possible text and graphics quality.

"The duty cycle allows up to 85 000 pages a month, meaning that large volume jobs can be printed in-house at considerably lower costs which is an important advantage for SM businesses."

The Phaser 8500 is currently retailing for less than R10 000.