Basically the same printer as the Xerox Phaser 6600/DN$474.99 at OfficeDepot, but without a duplexer (for two-sided printing), the Xerox Phaser 6600/N ($549) color laser printer offers the same capable paper handling, along with solid output quality across the board. Like its near-twin, it’s a little on the slow side. However, it’s a good fit for a small to medium-size office or workgroup that doesn’t need duplexing, needs to print a lot of pages by small-office standards, and needs the output to look good.
Literally the only difference between the 6600/N$403.19 at pcRUSH.com and Xerox 6600/DN is the lack of a duplexer. That means that if you don’t need automatic two-sided printing, you can save about $100 by getting the 6600/N. But before you buy it, be absolutely sure you don’t need to duplex. Xerox doesn’t offer an upgrade to let you add the feature later.
The printer’s paper handling is otherwise a match for its duplexing doppelgänger. It comes with both a 550-sheet drawer and 150-sheet multipurpose tray standard, which is enough for heavy-duty printing in a small office. If you need even more capacity, you can add a second 550-sheet drawer ($299) for a total of 1,250 sheets. Not so incidentally, the 550-sheet capacity for the drawers is a welcome convenience. It lets you refill the drawer with an entire ream of paper even before it’s fully empty.
Setup and Speed
As you’d expect for any printer with this level of paper capacity, the Phaser 6600/N is too big to comfortably share a desk with, at 15.1 by 16.9 by 19.2 inches (HWD). It also weighs a touch over 56 pounds, which makes moving it into place a two-person job for most. Once in place, however, setup is both simple and typical for a color laser.
Connection options include the expected Ethernet and USB ports, with an optional Wi-Fi adapter ($99) also available. The only mobile printing support is for AirPrint, which requires a Wi-Fi access point on your network, whether you connect the printer itself by Wi-Fi or Ethernet. I connected the printer by its Ethernet port and ran my tests from a Windows Vista system.
Xerox rates the printer at 36 pages per minute (ppm) for both monochrome and color, which is the speed you should see when you’re printing files that require little to no processing. On our business applications suite (timed with QualityLogic’s hardware and software), it came in at a much slower 4.5 ppm. That’s essentially a tie with the Xerox 6600/DN, which came in at nearly the same speed for both duplex and simplex modes.
As a point of comparison, the Editors’ Choice Xerox Phaser 6500/DN$350.00 at Amazon was faster even in duplex mode, at 5.2 ppm, and much faster in simplex mode, at 6.5 ppm. Less important for an office printer, but still worth pointing out, is the fact that the 6600/N was unusually slow for a color laser for photos, averaging 45 seconds for a 4 by 6 in our tests.
Output Quality
Given speed that’s best described as tolerable but a little slow, it helps a lot that the output quality is good enough to be worth waiting for. Text is at the low end of the range where the vast majority of color lasers fall, but that’s still good enough for any business use. Depending on how critical an eye you have, you may also consider it acceptable for moderately serious desktop publishing. Graphics quality is on par for a laser, making it more than good enough for PowerPoint handouts and the like.
Photo output on plain paper was at the high end of the range you can expect from a color laser. If you mounted most of the color photos from my tests in a frame behind glass, you’d have trouble telling that they weren’t true photo quality and printed on photo paper. I would rate the photos, along with the text and graphics, as good enough for printing your own marketing materials like tri-fold brochures or one-page handouts and mailers.
The Xerox Phaser 6600/N’s strongest points are its paper handling and output quality. If you don’t need the high paper capacity, the Editors’ Choice Xerox Phaser 6500/DN will give you essentially the same output quality with faster speed for $150 less. If you need the high paper capacity plus duplexing, the Xerox Phaser 6600/DN is the obvious alternative. If you print enough to take advantage of the high capacity, however, but you don’t need duplexing, and especially if you need high-quality output, the Xerox Phaser 6600/N could easily be the right printer for your office.
