Xerox WorkCentre 6515DNI
The best colour laser here, with excellent prints, speedy output and an intuitive screen – but it’s costly to run
SCORE PRICE £249 (£299 inc VAT) from printerland.co.uk
It’s hard to make a colour laser MFP look attractive, but Xerox has done its best. A few curves and minimal clutter help it look slightly smaller than it is, while its cream and blue plastic at least differentiates it from the laser pack. Another nice touch: the hinged touchscreen control panel is more neatly integrated than the one on Canon’s i-Sensys MF734Cdw. Overall, the 6515DNI is almost handsome.
This is another highly specified MFP. In its base there’s a laser printer rated at 28ppm in both black and colour, while the 50-sheet ADF on top has twin image sensors, allowing it to scan, copy or fax double-sided originals with a minimum of fuss. You can connect it via USB, wireless or Gigabit Ethernet, and below the touchscreen there’s a USB port for walk-up printing or scanning. There’s a substantial multipurpose tray, too. It’s rated for 50 pages, but it’s a shame that the main cassette only holds 250 sheets. You can buy an additional 550-sheet tray for £130.
The WorkCentre 6515 has been around for a while, and its setup program hasn’t aged well. Although it installed the printer and scanner without any apparent problem, we subsequently found that all duplex print options were greyed out in both the PCL and PostScript drivers. With some help from Xerox we found that the duplexer hadn’t been detected during the install, and were able to switch it on by adjusting the printer properties. We’d recommend ignoring the driver CD altogether and simply downloading Smart Start from the Xerox website – it installs newer drivers that worked perfectly.
The latest version of Xerox’s PC software is easy to use, but while its Mobile Link Android app supports quite advanced scanner workflows, it’s overcomplicated for casual users in a small office. For mobile printing, there’s an Android print service, plus support for Apple AirPrint, Google Cloud Print and Mopria.
The WorkCentre’s intuitive touchscreen pivots through a full 90 degrees, but at times it feels as though it’s a victim of its own sophistication. It takes virtually a minute to boot up, and although it responds clearly to commands it can subsequently be slow to load up and display menus and information pages. The “key” press noise is unusually quiet and subtle: we found that leaving it on helped prevent confusion over inputs.
Generally, this MFP was about as fast as Canon’s similarly specified i-Sensys MF734Cdw ( see p87). It delivered black text at 23.1ppm, and colour graphics at 20ppm, with duplex colour graphics emerging at a decent 11.5ppm. Copies were also fast, with a single mono page arriving in ten seconds, and ten pages needing 29 seconds. In colour, the same jobs took 12 and 49 seconds respectively. A ten-page duplex colour copy took 77 seconds, equivalent to 15.6ppm.
Scanning was swift, if not exactly breakneck. Previews completed in 11 seconds, with an A4 scan at 300dpi taking 25 seconds. Only our 1,200dpi 6 x 4in photo scan needed longer – 80 seconds. Strangely, given that we tested over Gigabit Ethernet, the data transfer seemed to take far longer than the actual physical scan process, which usually sounded like it was done within ten seconds or so.
It’s hard to fault any of the results from this MFP. Its scans showed good colour accuracy and a high dynamic range, with every shade in our test target clearly distinguished. Text was pin sharp, while graphics were crisp, punchy and vice-free. Photo quality was as good as we’ve seen from a laser printer, particularly direct prints from an inserted USB drive – printed from a PC, a couple of our test shots had a slightly cool colour bias. Black copies were essentially perfect, so we were surprised to find colour copies were a little dark and de-saturated.
Despite some minor niggles, this is a great colour multifunction device for a small office. It’s a shame, then, that with toner working out at 11p per black and colour page it’s not particularly cheap to run. Factor in all its longer life maintenance items and the costs go up to 11.6p per page. If you really want a laser device, this is a great choice, but be aware that HP’s PageWide Pro 477dw ( see p81) costs the same, is generally faster, produces similarly good results, and costs less than half as much to run.