Xerox Phaser 4620DN

The Xerox Phaser 4620DN ($1,599 list) is a formidable monochrome laser printer: somewhat massive, able to handle enormous printing volume, with a sizzling rated speed and a price tag to match. It prints beautiful text—not quite as quickly as its price and speed rating would warrant, and its graphics and photos were of below-par quality. If your office needs to print a ton of top-notch text, it could well be the printer for you. The blue and white 4620DN measures 16.5 by 18.7 by 21.3 inches (HWD) and weighs 76 pounds large enough so you wouldn’t want to share a desk with it and you’d need two people to move it into place. The 4620DN has generous paper capacity, with a 550-sheet main tray and a 100-sheet secondary tray, plus an automatic duplexer, as standard.

Additional 550-sheet trays ($250 street) and a 2,000-sheet tray ($750 street) are available as options; the printer’s maximum capacity is 2,750 sheets. Other options include a 500-sheet finisher/50-sheet stapler ($500 street); a 4-bin, 400-sheet mailbox ($500); 512MB of memory ($720); a 160GB hard drive ($400); and a print stand ($200).

The Phaser 4620DN is one of five models in Xerox’s 4600/4620 series. All models have a maximum duty cycle of 275,000 pages per month. The Xerox 4600N, 4600DN, and 4600DT have a rated speed of up to 55 ppm, while the Xerox 4620DN and 4620DT are rated at 65 ppm. The 4600N ($1,099 list) lacks an automatic duplexer, while the 4600DT ($1,549 list) and 4620DT ($1,849 list) add a second 550-sheet paper tray for a standard paper capacity of 1,200 sheets.The Xerox Phaser 4620DN has Ethernet and USB connectivity; 802.11n WiFi is available as a $200 option. I tested the Phaser over an Ethernet connection with a PC running Windows Vista.

Speed

I timed the Xerox Phaser 4620DN on the latest version of our business applications suite (using QualityLogic's hardware and software for timing), at 10.1 effective pages per minute (ppm). Its rated print speed, based on text-only printing, is 65 ppm. (Our test suite combines text pages, graphics pages, and pages with mixed content.) It effectively matched speeds with the Editors’ Choice Lexmark T650N ($700 street, 4 stars), although the Lexmark is rated at just 45 ppm, and lagged the 12 ppm turned in by the OKI B730DN ($1,249 direct, 4 stars), with its 52 ppm rated speed.

Output Quality and Other Issues

In short, the Phaser 4620DN’s output for text, graphics, and photos is a bit on the dark side. This served it well for printing text, not so well for photos and graphics.

Text was dark and crisp, and a little bit above par for lasers, which is to say it’s very good. It should be fine for any business use, even ones requiring very small fonts, such as some demanding desktop publishing applications.

The overall darkness was problematic in the graphics, though it did give them crispness. Loss of contrast between darker shades made it difficult to distinguish between different zones in bar graphs and pie charts. In one graphic with very thin white lines on a dark background, the lines were barely visible. In another graphic designed to show a gradation between dark and light areas, there was little difference between the areas, which showed up as black and very dark. Overall, the graphics were sub-par for a mono laser; the 4620DN could be used to print PowerPoint handouts, but only if you’re very careful in picking the shades for charts.

With photos, although there was good contrast in brighter areas, the opposite was true of darker areas, which suffered from a loss of detail. Images showed dithering (visible dot patterns); one showed banding (a regular pattern of faint, darker bars); and one showed aliasing (thin black lines appearing saw-toothed). Photo quality was a bit below par for a mono laser, good enough to print out recognizable images from files or Web pages but not up to the level I’d want for a client newsletter.

Many high-end business laser printers include multiple printer drivers, including PCL and PostScript drivers. We normally run our business applications and text quality tests using the PCL driver at the standard-quality setting, then switch to the PostScript driver at the highest quality setting to output our photo test suite. The 4620DN was unable to print out the photo suite with the PostScript driver set to Enhanced quality, so we printed it at Standard quality instead.

The 4620DN gets kudos for a low claimed cost per page of 1.4 cents, based on purchase of the highest-yield cartridges. Still, the OKI B730DN matches that, and the Lexmark T650N lags them by just 0.3 cents per page.

The Xerox Phaser 4620DN is a reasonable choice for a monochrome laser printer for an office with high printing volume, particularly one that churns out large amounts of text, which it prints beautifully. Its low running cost will help to offset its relatively high sticker price over time. Yet it stumbled a bit on graphics and photos, and the speed we tested it at—though by no means slow—wasn’t up to what we’d expect considering its price and sizzling rated speed. The Editors’ Choice Lexmark T650N offers better graphics quality (though not as good text) for less than half the price, and the OKI B730DN is faster, less expensive, and very capable, but if churning out lots of top-quality text is paramount, the 4620DN should be on your short list.

BENCHMARK TEST RESULTS:

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