|
|
08/08/2004 |
|
|
Xerox WorkCentre M950 David Dorn gets to grips with Xerox’s all-in-one printstation
There’s a trend towards the all-in-one or multifunction device. You can get a PDA with a mobile phone built in, your Sony Playstation 2 is also a DVD player, you can even get a Mercedes People Carrier that’s also a removal van. The problem usually tends to be that, in combining the functionality of more than one, often disparate device, compromises have to be made, often not for the better. It’s no surprise, therefore, that printer manufacturers (who also tend to make scanners) are increasingly listing printers that are also scanners and often fax machines, as well as photocopiers. When it comes to Photocopiers, there’s probably no better known company in the world than Xerox. In the US, for instance, a gopher in the office will often be told to “Xerox me fifteen copies”. Now, although Xerox is probably better known for its
laser based products in that arena, its latest offering in the sub-£300
class multi-function world, the WorkCentre M950, is a thermal inkjet
based product that has a few nifty features attached to it, not
least being both flatbed and sheet-feed scanning. Billed as a
Printer, Scanner, Copier and Fax unit, the M950 is pitched fairly
and squarely at the business user, although its photo-printing and
scanning capabilities are likely to appeal to the home user, too.
Setup Securely boxed in recyclable packaging, the M950 comes plastered with blue sticky tape and bits of protective cardboard that take some shifting. The ink cartridges are to install, which is where this reviewer scored a couple of black (and cyan magenta and yellow) marks against it. Unlike offerings from almost every other manufacturer, the Xerox ink tanks have a tear off strip over the ink outlet nozzle, and I defy anyone to take the strips off all four tanks without splattering their fingers – if not their arms - with ink. It’s a tad agricultural, frankly, and not necessary these days. That said, installation is a breeze, and not particularly time consuming, especially if you opt for the USB connectivity, for which a cable is provided. The whole process is covered neatly in the manual, as well as an eye-catching loose addendum. Copying The first port of call with a unit such as this is always the photocopying function – and nearly always with a photo, too. Onto plain paper, the results aren’t brilliant straight out of the box, but once you delve into the reference manual a little, you discover that there are myriad modes settable from the control panel at the front of the machine. It’s relatively straightforward to use, although older eyes will want their glasses to hand to read the rather too small LCD display, which is not backlit. Once you get to grips with presets and paper types, it’s simple. Choosing a glossy paper for a photo-copy gives acceptable results – not as good as a high-res scan and output to a dedicated photo printer like Epson’s Stylus Photo 790, but pretty darned good enough for most folks. Ordinary mono copying is a doddle, too – you can even stack up to 20 sheets in the top-mounted sheet feeder and make a cuppa while it gets on with the job in hand. It’s not, though, as fast as a “proper” laser-based copier – but at this price, that’s hardly surprising. Scanning With a native optical resolution of 600x600 dots per inch, the scan unit is position in the middle of the current crop of low-cost scanners. Maximum interpolated resolution is 1200x1200 (which just happens to be the maximum print resolution, too, coincidentally), which more than most people need. It’s much the same as any other scanner – it’s quick, via the USB port, with a TWAIN driver that’s very, very simple to use, devoid, as it is, of some of the more esoteric bells and whistles that most folk never use. In OCR mode, using the excellent bundled TextBridge Pro, the review unit achieved 100% accuracy on four or five laser printed multi-page documents in both sheet-fed and flatbed modes. That’s going some – expect closer to 98% over time. Photographic scans, even at maximum resolution, don’t quite match up to that laudable ability, although, again, they’re easily good enough at more reasonable resolutions for business purposes. The big bonus is, of course, the combined sheet and flatbed – it makes for light work on tedious multi-page scans. Printing No four-colour printer will ever match the output, resolution for resolution, of a six-colour unit, so it’s hardly fair to compare photographic output from the M950 with a photo printer. In comparison with other four-colour printers, though, it performs very well. Black text is crisp and well-formed, while photo-quality images onto glossy paper look rich and more than just acceptable at 1200x1200dpi. Business-style documents printed onto uncoated paper look good, and there’s a neat Xpress mode which speeds the process up quite considerably. Niggles It’s the paper handling that lets the M950 down a little. Changing paper types is a fiddle, as there’s no single-sheet feed immediately apparent – you’ve got to slide a single sheet of photo paper onto the top of the pile in the 150-sheet input bin. Aside from that, the 180 degree paper path doesn’t adversely affect the paper, and ink delivery is such that a print is dry almost as soon as it touches the output tray. Overall Multifunction devices are often a bit of a curate’s egg. Some do some things better than others but perform certain other tasks worse. I’m not so sure about the fax functionality being trumpeted on this unit, for instance, since the whole setup assumes that you have a modem installed on your machine, and that it’s fax capable. That doesn’t bode well for the small office that uses a shared modem or networked ISDN router, but fax, these days, is fast being replaced by email (and not before time, in this writer’s far from humble opinion) so it’s not that significant. If you really want, you can scan straight to email from the M950 – just don’t send me the result! In short, for well under the magic £300 mark, the WorkCentre M950 has enough redeeming features that its easy to recommend it for general day-to-day workhorse use. It’s not designed for reproducing 250 copies of a ten page report complete with colour photos, but it’ll handle five or six quite nicely. Same applies to its printing, and its individual ink tanks make it a little cheaper to run that is often the case with other makes. Scanning is pretty much par for the course, but excellent in the OCR stakes, so on that basis – that it’s really quite good at most things, without being earth-shatteringly excellent at any one thing, it’s good value for money, and well worth a look. |
