Stephen Withers03 July 2008, 12:00 PM
The biggest and meanest workgroup printer on the block.
The DocuPrint C2255 is an A3 colour S-LED printer with USB
2.0 and 10/100 Ethernet interfaces. S-LED stands for Self-scanning Light
Emitting Diode - a printing technology that involves fewer moving parts than
needed by the more common laser engines.
The C2255 has the distinction of being the heaviest printer
we’ve tested. A warning label on the side of the printer - not visible until it
is unpacked - suggests the main unit weighs 63kg. You’ll definitely need two
strong adults to unpack it.
The review sample was a pre-release evaluation unit, and
came without printed documentation. Despite that, installation and setup proved
straightforward - apart from struggling with the weight. The main unit sits on
top of the (separately packed) second paper tray, bringing the dimensions to 65
x 66 x 51cm. Third and fourth trays may be added, further increasing the
height.
Each tray appears to hold around 300 sheets of 80gsm paper,
with provision for another 50 or so sheets in the side-mounted flip-down bypass
tray. Fuji Xerox claims a maximum capacity of 3480 sheets. The bypass tray is
ugly and intrusive when in use, even when closed does not blend smoothly into
the main shell, which has boring major-office-equipment-manufacturer styling.
As you might expect of a printer in this class, a duplexer is standard.
The toner cartridges are fitted via the front door, giving
convenient access.
PostScript and PCL drivers are provided for Windows 2000,
XP, Server 2003 and Vista (including x64 versions), and installation is
straightforward. A PostScript driver for Mac OS 8/9 and Mac OS X is provided,
but setup would be simplified if the printer’s Bonjour support was switched on
by default. Some of the printing options in the driver are too wide for Mac OS
X 10.5’s print dialog box, so for instance the Brightness slider in Image
Options is not fully visible. That said, the driver only claims compatibility
with 10.3 and 10.4.
Nominal print speed is 25ppm for colour and mono. We
recorded 25 seconds click-to-drop for the first colour A4 page, with the second
page emerging after another three seconds, which is equivalent to 20ppm. Subjectively,
the C2255 seemed a little quieter than the large format lasers we’ve previously
tested.
Print quality was good, with characters appearing smoothly
formed even under a magnifying glass. Business graphics were bright with smooth
gradients, and we were impressed with test set of photos - the low-gloss toner
meant printed areas did not stand out from the white paper as much as they do
with many laser printers. The maximum resolution of 1200 x 2400 dpi probably
helped too. You wouldn’t use the C2255 as a photo printer, but we’d suggest you
wouldn’t be disappointed with the reproduction of any photos in your documents.
A solid black page printed with above-average evenness and a solid black
appearance. The minimum margins are between 4 and 5mm.
A web interface gives remote access to the printer status,
jobs, settings and so on, and may also be used to send certain types of file
(including PostScript, TIFF and JPEG) for printing. The unit includes various
security features, including IP address filtering and the ability to hold a
document in memory until a PIN is entered. There’s also provision for the
printer to generate an email notification when a job has finished printing.
Other useful features of the printer include booklet
pagination, including reduction to smaller paper sizes and margin adjustment to
allow for the fold and binding, job accounting, and barcode printing.
Some of the most interesting things about the C2255 involve
factors we do not test - Fuji Xerox claims the S-LED technology improves
reliability and reduces energy consumption, and that the C2255 is lead and
halogen free. Still on environmental aspects, manufacture of the EA-HG toner
used is said to emit up to 35 percent less carbon dioxide than conventional
toners. Another unusual feature is that the printer is supposed to be able to
embed a hidden unique identifier to allow unauthorised copies to be traced to
their source, but the description in the PDF manual did not match the settings
available in the web interface, so we assume a prerequisite option was not
installed.
This feature-rich printer would be best suited to a
relatively sophisticated IT environment that can take full advantage of its
features, but the combination of above average output quality and below average
noise levels should make it popular even with employees that just want to print
everyday documents.