Xerox Phaser 6140 Color Laser Printer: Pretty Fast, Pretty Cheap

The Xerox Phaser 6140 is a color laser printer aimed at small and home offices. While it's bigger and more expensive than consumer-oriented color laser printers, it does have a robust duty cycle and does its work quickly; even better, it prints out great-looking color graphics. If you can find a good deal on it (I've seen it online for as little as $224) it will be a great deal for a small office that requires a lot of color printing. If your color printing needs are few, you'll find better deals on a Brother LED printer or a Samsung laser printer.

The Xerox Phaser 6140 Color Laser Printer is an office-quality laser printer for the price of a home printer--I've seen it online for as little as $224. Like most laser printers, it takes a bit of waiting for the first page to come out (in my tests, usually around 13 seconds, exactly what Xerox promises. Once it gets going, it starts shooting pages out in a perfectly respectable three seconds per page. That's slightly better than the consumer-oriented Brother HL-3070CW, another excellent color laser printer; but of course, the Brother printer is wireless, smaller, and cheaper. (The Phaser 6140 is also available with wireless networking for an extra $219).)

But this is meant for small offices and it offers some advantages for office users. It has a duty cycle of up to 40,000 images per month; 500-sheet paper capacity; secure printing; and a 400 MHz processor, which is pretty powerful. It doesn't offer a built-in duplexer, however (there's an optional one available for $149 through Xerox), and of course since it's not an all-in-one, there's no scanner or copier. One thing I really liked was the "Run Black" feature which would allow the printer to print in monochrome mode when a color toner cartridge is empty. As obvious as this sounds, it's not always the case.

Prints came out looking quite excellent. Some laser printers heat up copy paper so much that it comes out curled; the Phaser didn't have that problem. Most impressive of all was how it handles colors. The printer has four toner cartridges (which come already installed in the printer, to save set-up time--thank you, Xerox!) and graphics looked crisp and the colors very true to the originals. Even an 8.5 x11 photo printed on the cheapest paper available looked pretty respectable, meaning that brochures and presentations will look top-notch after printing.

The printer does have a fairly large footprint compared to its consumer cousins--it measures 15.8 x 18 x 16.3 and probably weighs in at over 20 pounds. The Phaser 6140 didn't come with built-in support for Windows 7, so set-up required a new driver to be downloaded and installed. That was a pretty easy process, though keep in mind it means you'll need admin rights during this process.

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