Xerox Phaser 6010 Color LED Printer

The Xerox Phaser 6010 is a color LED printer for small workgroups and offices. It's smaller than some other Xerox Phasers I've reviewed, and the small footprint makes it a decent choice for offices that don't have a lot of extra room. There's no wireless but there is built-in Ethernet networking. Duplexing is manual but available. At around $299 it's quite competitive, particularly given the solid results. Despite the size and price, Xerox says this Phaser is aimed squarely at SMBs and isn't a foray into the consumer market. Still, some savvy consumers may profit nonetheless!

The Xerox Phaser 6010 Color Laser Printer is made for small workgroups, as it can be easily networked for multiple users. It has a fairly robust monthly duty cycle (30,000 pages) and not many bells or whistles (manual duplexing, no wireless support, small LED display). So ultimately you might wonder why it's priced higher than the Xerox Phaser 6140 Color Laser Printer, which has a higher duty capacity (40,000 pages) and comes in at dozens of dollars cheaper. The most obvious answer is size: The 6010 is about the size of (or even smaller than) most inkjet all-in-ones, while the 6140 was fairly monstrous in footprint.

The other reasons are mostly under the printer's hood. The 6010 uses LED technology, rather than a laser, to print. Xerox Product Marketing Manager Dan Lefco explains that LED technology has improved dramatically over the past few years. Not only better, but smaller--"The LED is a quarter of an inch thick by 12 inches long," he says, a quarter or less than lasers. That allows for a smaller form factor. "LED fusing uses less energy than traditional energy," Lefko adds, "so the environmental impact is less compared to a laser printer. And there are fewer moving parts in an LED device; less parts moving means less to break, which equals improved reliability."

The 6010 is also quite fast. A cheaper laser printer (say, the HP LaserJet Pro CP 1525) may offer built-in wireless (which is, I will say, a big advantage), it may sacrifice print speeds. The HP LaserJet 1525, with a similar duty cycle to the Phaser 6010, had first-page-out times of 30 seconds, compared to around 15-18 for the Phaser. Subsequent pages on the Phaser took 3-5 seconds per page, while the LaserJet took about seven. Nor did the Phaser prints suffer from page curl, which I'll presume is another benefit of LED technology.

Of course, it's all about the quality of the results, and I saw no flaws with the Phaser. Color graphics looked sharp, rich, and were glossier than prints from some lasers (Lefko says this is because the toner fuses at a lower temperature). Even a full-page color photo, printed on laser paper, looked excellent (and took less than 20 seconds). You''ll not want to get rid of your photo printer quite yet, but for brochures and flyers, the quality was more than acceptable.

I encountered no glitches during setup or while printing from a variety of file types. I have read of some users who had difficulties in getting the printer to work with Linux, though the specs specifically point to several Linux distros that are compatible--so if you do plan to use the printer with Linux, be prepared for some extra work.

Disclosure: Review samples were provided by the manufacturer. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.