8860 Review by Tom S.

In time past printers were hard to manage, hard to reload, slow, exasperating and certainly weren’t designed to coexist peacefully with mankind. That was then. Enter stage right the new Xerox Phaser 8860 Solid Ink printer, a beautiful addition to a growing number of Xerox user-friendly printer models. The printer is solid ink-based, which is proprietary Xerox technology that uses ink sticks instead of ink or toner cartridges. The technology purportedly generates one tenth of the waste of comparable color laser printers. Xerox says this makes them more environmentally friendly because it means reduced hazardous waste in landfills.

“So what?” shrug 95% of office managers in chorus. Everybody loves the environment, just so long as environmentalism doesn’t get in the way of productivity. Well, turns out the Phaser 8860 meets and exceeds most expectations in the performance sector. The printer can print equally fast in color as black and white – a peppy 30 PPM – and it can keep chugging at that rate for a hefty 120,000 images per month. The Phaser 8860 also boasts that its first page out time hovers around five seconds in color, but that’s after the printer is warm. First page out time from a cold start is over 13 minutes, which is pretty long. The solid ink printer comes with a standard 256 MB of memory (upgradeable to 1 GB) which enables it handle the large jobs. The 750 MHz processor also fits the 8860 nicely, giving it the capability to print large, highly detailed pictures and graphics.

Given the Phaser 8860’s excellent speed and processing power, many offices managers would expect to sacrifice a little on quality, but that’s not the case. The Phaser 8860 is capable of producing remarkably high quality prints. Its uses a 2400 FinePoint resolution, which gives fine-grained detail to graphics and pictures with surprisingly little dithering. The solid ink sticks that deliver the quality of the 8860 are also easy to use, just drop them in their color-coded slot. The 8860 ink sticks won’t smudge or smear with skin contact and they leave zero waste.

Refreshingly low operating costs are perhaps the greatest thing about the Xerox Phaser 8860. While the printer itself costs more than other comparable laser printers, the minimal cost of the replacement supplies makes day to day operation a lot more affordable. You can forget the many replacement parts that traditional laser printers are saddled with as well; no transfer roll, no fuser unit, none of it. Aside from the ink, there’s only a 30,000 page maintenance kit that costs less than $40.

All in all, the Phaser 8860 solid ink printer is a quality printer that delivers speed, convenience, and perhaps most importantly affordability to a midsize office environment. May the days of wrestling with the office printer be gone forever. Welcome, Phaser 8860, and thanks for making human-printer interaction a whole lot more compelling.