Xerox Phaser 7760 GX — Review
Xerox Phaser 7760GX Review
Have you been looking at purchasing the Xerox Phaser 7760GX color printer. We thought we’d go ahead and put some pros and cons regarding this printer for those who may be interested.
The first key to know is Xerox has HUGE trade in rebates if you have about any old printer and want to purchase a Xerox Phaser 776o printer. Also, there is a regular $1,000 rebates. If you were going to buy a Xerox Phaser 7760 printer, you can get $2,000 in total rebates, close to a 40% cost savings. Call if you want to purchase a Xerox Phaser 7760GX printer!
OK – So why do people purchase the Xerox Phaser 7760GX in the first place?
- AMAZING color matching. The Xerox Phaser 7760GX has software and capabilities the Xerox Phaser 7760DN does not have. If you want software worth close to $1,500 — Get the Xerox Phaser 7760GX over the Xerox Phaser 7760DN!
- It’s a lot cheaper to purchase than a color copier is!
- You can be on a fixed cost plan if you do tons of color
- Drivers are rock solid!
Cons to the Xerox Phaser 7760GX printer:
- If you do tons of color (over 3,000 pages a month, a copier like the Workcentre 7435/PT is more appropriate in terms of long term TCO.
- If you do not have a spectrometer, you color matching will be excellent, just not perfect.
- Higher cost per page than Xerox WorkCentre copiers
I have seen that this particular printer is the favorite of graphic design companies and marketing firms. Please give us a call if you are looking for a Xerox Phaser 7760GX color printer!
Xerox Phaser 8860 Trade-In Rebate
OK, maybe it is just me, but I like simplicity. Xerox has an amazing trade in program but it is fairly brutal to go through all of the steps to actually get your claim submitted. I just went through this process, starting at this spot on Xerox’s site… I would have to go anywhere from 14 different web pages to 17 different pages to claim the trade in rebate for the Xerox Phaser 8860DN color laser printer.
Granted, here we have a multi-billion dollar printer manufacturer. If they can frustrate even 15% of potential users at $500 each times 1,000 to 2,000 people, this process can mean they save $1,000,000 dollars.
Is there a reason it’s hard? Yes. Plug away at it and you’ll get your $500 rebate check! If you are looking for a Xerox Phaser 8860DN, please give us a call!
How Does a Laser Printer Work?
How a Laser Printer Works
How Does a Laser Printer Work?
A laser printer uses a xerographic printing process where the image to be printed is projected onto a rotating drum coated with selenium or other rare metals which is electrically charged. The charge is removed by photo-conductivity from the areas exposed to light. The toner or dry ink particles are electrostatically picked up by the dark, charged areas and the image is printed onto paper by the drum with heat which fuses the toner to the paper. Laser printers print many copies very quickly and give a highly accurate rendering of an image or text.
The components for this process are the drum, fuser, toner, static electricity and the printer controller. The printer controller communicates with the computer through a network, parallel or USB port and the data is transferred to the printer. The computer first ascertains if a printer is attached and ready and the printer sends a signal back to the computer indicating it is attached and ready for data. The computer will also send any fonts that the printer may need and not have stored in its data bank. The printer chooses how to arrange the data on a piece of paper. Laser printers compose the whole page in memory before transferring it to paper. A page with graphics is usually 512 MB of memory or more, so a good laser printer should have at least 1 GB of memory.
Laser printers with more memory can hold multiple pages which will offload the material quicker from the computer. For this to happen the computer and the printer need to speak the same language which is commonly Printer Command Language (PCL) or PostScript (PS).
The laser printer arranges the margins and graph space. After this, the Raster Image processor (RIP) breaks down the data and stores it in the printer’s memory. The drum must be prepared. It is scanned with red-filtered light in older models or a charged drum in newer models electrostatically cleaning the drum. The data is scanned by a laser and written on the drum, then the laser assembly which includes the mirror, lens and laser moves the beam in such a way that it changes the electrical charge on the image or text that are to be printed to be a negative charge from the blank spaces which have a positive charge.
The paper is grasped by the feed rollers and the toner is picked up at almost the same time. The paper must feed in at exactly the right time when the top of the paper and the laser image are together. The drum revolves and the toner sticks to the negatively charged places of the text or image. A toner cartridge contains a magnetic, rotating, metal-developing cylinder, a toner reservoir and a height control mechanism that controls the amount of toner picked up. Toner or dry ink is plastic resin particles that melt in the heating rollers and stick to the paper and iron oxide which adheres to the magnetic cylinder that presents the toner to the drum. As the drum passes by the cylinder the toner jumps off and clings to the areas with the negative or lesser charge. The paper receives a positive charge from the transfer corona so when it passes the drum, the toner with the negative charge jumps to the positively charged paper. This is also where ozone is produced for higher speed laser printers. This is environmentally bad, but there are some solutions to this toxin. A pair of non-stick rollers, the fuser, heated to almost 365 degrees Fahrenheit, melts the toner to the paper as it passes between them. Each laser printer has sensors for each step to make sure the paper is in the right place for the next step.
Sometimes there are vertical white lines or gray mist appearing on the finished product. To fix these problems the corona wires need to be cleaned. This is a very delicate procedure because the wires are thin and can break easily. They can be cleaned with a felt-lined tool that comes with the printer or a cotton swab dipped in alcohol. The gray mist may also come if the printer’s print density control is on too high of a setting. When the drum is new the setting can be very low. It is also possible it is a bad drum, which in most laser printers is contained within the toner cartridge. Sometimes the easiest fix because of this is to try replacing the toner cartridge.
When the image or text is not dark enough to look good it most likely means the toner is almost finished. This can come in splotched areas on the page or on the whole page. Horizontal black lines on the final print usually mean the roller is dirty or damaged. Since there can be about seven rollers in a laser printer, you need to measure where the black line is on the page then determine which roller may be the problem. Regularly spaced splotches are most likely a scratch or flaw in the drum or a build-up of toner on the fusing roller. A vertical line on the edge of the page usually indicates an empty or faulty cartridge. If the page comes out blank, there is no more toner in the laser printer.
Realtor’s Special!! — $800!
Are you looking for a color laser printer that is used, but comes with tons of supplies? We have a HP Laserjet 4550 with a lot of extra supplies (can be purchased seperately!) The cartridge items numbers (there are a mix of OEM and compatibles) are as follows… the C4191A, C4192A, C4193A, and the C4194A… There are a total of 7 extra cartridges plus there is a transfer kit and a fuser kit too! Everything you would need to get a ton of color prints out at a reasonable price! There is enough extra toner to get over 20,000 pages at 20% coverage. This works out to be $.04 per color print! See if you can get this kind of pricing at Kinkos!
Mailing and the Xerox Phaser 8860 or the Xerox Phaser 8560…
The Xerox Phaser 8560 and Xerox Phaser 8860 is a Fragile Mailing Experience!
If you speak to a sales rep who sells the Xerox Phaser 8560 or the Xerox Phaser 8860 it will seem like this is the best printer in the history of mankind… if you are speaking to someone who sells another brand of color printer in Denver, it will be the worst printer in mankind! I guess this is how perspective works. We focus on what works for us. I suppose this is the benefit of being a multi-vendor company. We can see strengths and weaknesses and not freak out one way or the other.
FYI — The Phaser 8560 and the Phaser 8860 are basically the same printer – just different supplies (bigger wax blocks in the Phaser 8860 and lower costs for the wax making it have a much lower cost per print)
The Xerox Phaser 8560 is a wax technology. Think of it this way… 4 different colors of crayons are melted, shot through a printhead and pushed into the paper through some pressure. Now, the nice part is that even cheap paper looks like glossy paper since it is wax and not a traditional color laser printer. The disadvantage is this… Mail sorters. How does a mail sorter work? Basically seperation and then it goes through a reader. In order to read correctly it must go through individually. This requires pressure. The volume of mail requires speed. Speed and pressure basically equals heat. Heat melts wax… are you starting to see the issue?
Now, other manufacturers will act as if you will have a clean piece of paper and candle wax in an envelope. It’s not that bad. There is simply some streaking that can occur. Before you decide to buy the Xerox Phaser 8560 or the Xerox Phaser 8860 color printer, just have some print samples run. If you never do mailers, don’t worry. If you do, it may still be OK, but you will want to test the runs so that you do not purchase a color printer that you’ll want to return.
If you send us files, we’d be happy to print and mail you some samples. If you hear that the Xerox Phaser 8560 or the Xerox Phaser 8860 is awful, don’t worry, you are probably talking to someone who sells a competitor’s color box. If you hear no one ever had this problem, you are probably talking to a Xerox employee.
Citrix Printing Challenges… A Customer’s Perspective
Lexmark - A Citrix Friendly Manufacturer!
We have had a few Kyocera printer driver problems as it relates to the Citrix environment. We bought 2 Kyocera FS-4000DN printers and one Kyocera FS-4020DN. The Kyocera FS-4020DN would intermittently freeze in the middle of a print job sent to it by a Windows client or a Citrix client.
The Kyocera FS-4000DNs had formatting problems including minimum margin settings, correct landscape or portrait orientation, and correct fonts. The minimum margin setting would produce print jobs where the last character and a half on the right side would be off the page. The same print job sent to an HP Laserjet printer or Lexmark printer would all be on the page. Some Crystal Reports executed through Citrix would not respect the default orientation setting. Also some Crystal Reports and some Excel spreadsheets would have incorrect fonts or graphics.
We found the Kyocera FS-4000DN KX driver was able to fix most of the formatting problems. However the Kyocera KX driver is not as stable as the Kyocera FS-4000DN driver. Occasionally the drivers will corrupt and the print queue in the Citrix session becomes unresponsive. An administrator must remove the driver from the Citrix servers and the print server and reinstall them.
Our experience with Lexmark devices has been rock solid. We have deployed Lexmark X646, Lexmark X651de, Lexmark X654de, Lexmark X658de, Lexmark T652, Lexmark E260, Lexmark E460, and a Lexmark C534 with no formatting problems and no stability problems. The cost per print for the Lexmarks may not be as low as the Kyocera’s but the fact that they have zero administrative problems more than makes up for that.
How To Find a Printer IP Address Quickly!
Diagnosing Print Issues -- IP Addresses
For one reason or another, people will often want to figure out what the IP Address is for their printer. Maybe a job is failing over and over, but the printer will print the status page fine, etc… The network cable is plugged in, etc. On the printer, the IP Address can generally be in the section of the menu called “Information Pages” or something along those lines. You can see what the IP address is set to in the printer. Then one can see if this IP Address matches the printer driver.
Once you have a configuration page, you can go START>CONTROL PANEL>PRINTERS AND FAXES>Select your device, RIGHT CLICK> PORTS — Widen column and see if the number listed there is the same as the IP Address on the printer itself. If it is not, there is your printing problem. They need to match!
Give us a call if you need printer driver help, we can do this for $50. Or just read the blog and do it yourself! ;)
Please call us for laser printers in Denver!
A Weird Way to Save Money on a Xerox 8860 Color Printer
Xerox Phaser 8860 tricks
We had a customer who really liked how cheap color printing was on the Xerox Phaser 8860. They had low coverage, so a cost per print plan didn’t make a lot of sense. They had an idea on how to make prints cheaper, and I was skeptical until I ran the analytics. Their solution, print text in blue rather than black.
We all know black and white prints are cheaper than color prints, so the blue text idea seemed weird. I ran their document, ran it through my color coverage analyzer, and the black page with 2 small pictures cost $.0247 per print. I changed the text color, that’s all, to dark blue and the cost went down to $.0226 per print. I then changed it to light blue and it went all the way down to $.0144 per print. Over a panny a print cheaper.
How could this happen? With the Xerox Phaser 8860 you need to remember the color blocks of wax cost 1/3 what the black blocks cost. Essentially, if you used only cyan for your text, the prints would literally cost 1/3 what the black and white prints cost. If it doesn’t matter and you own a Xerox Phaser 8860 printer, use cyan! If you own ANY OTHER color printer on the market, this advice DOES NOT APPLY!!
Color Printer Rental in Denver
Xerox Phaser 8860
Are you looking for a color printer, but don’t want to spend $2,000 right now to get a quality color printer? We have a Xerox Phaser 8860 available for rental right now, it’s brand new!! It would be just $245 per month for the printer and all of the supplies and maintenance you need to print 2,000 color pages a month! That’s less than $.125 a page regardless of coverage and including the equipment! What happens if you go over 2,o00 color prints? Perfect, it then is only $.06 per print!!
If you do Real Estate color printing or just don’t want to have to but a color laser printer in Denver, please give us a call!
Kyocera FS4020 Product Option vs The HP LaserJet P4015 Laser Printer
Kyocera FS 4020DN Laser Printer
HP has had shortages on their laserjet line for months and the Kyocera FS4020DN has been a nice replacement for the HP Laserjet P4015 Laser Printer. They have differences you may want to be aware of. Here are some of the basic differences you should be aware of.
DRUM — Kyocera uses a ceramic drum, which tends to last a long time and makes the printers cost of ownership be a lot lower than HP. However, if it is bad, you will want a technician to replace this componet (rated at 300,000 pages) instead of just changing the toner cartridge.
COST — The Kyocera is nearly 40% lower in price than the HP Laserjet series
DRIVERS — Everyone, and I mean everyone, supports HP printers, Kyocera can struggle in specialty applications. you’ll want to test a Kyocera if you have specialty software.
We feel Kyocera has a compelling story, we just want to make sure you know the benefits and limitations before taking the plunge!