The Hindu : National : Xerox unveils cheapest laser printer

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Mar 26, 2006

National

National

Xerox unveils cheapest laser printer

Anand Parthasarathy

It is a more economical proposition for home and small office; lasts longer

BANGALORE: Laser printers are for offices that need quality — and can afford to pay for it. Inkjets are for the rest of us, home personal computer users, on tight budgets. That has been the accepted wisdom for decades.

Xerox has just turned the logic upside down by unveiling the cheapest laser printer ever offered in India — at a price comparable to many budget inkjet printers.

The Phaser 3117 model costs Rs. 4,500 (exclusive of local taxes). Laser printers used to cost about Rs. 7,000-Rs. 10,000 for the simplest models, while inkjet prices have fallen to as low as Rs. 3,500 in recent months. However, for many lay users who have purchased a printer with their first PC, inkjets have turned out to be a costly proposition. They had to pay for the colour feature, even if they used the PC, mostly for printing letters and documents in black and white. The black ink cartridge ran out within weeks and at typically around Rs. 1,000 for a new 15 millilitre pack. The joke was, the ink was costlier than champagne!

As seasoned users know, if your printing consists mostly of monochrome documents, a laser printer ends up as a more economical proposition — even if the toner cartridge (lasers use dry powder rather than liquid ink) costs around Rs. 3,500-Rs. 4,000 — because it lasts much longer. Xerox, furnished The Hindu with a Phaser 3117 for evaluation. The resolution is 600 pixels by 600 pixels. This is less than what the pricier, professional laser printers provide but perfectly acceptable for almost all home-small-office work, and that includes printing most photos and pages from the web.

Installation of the printer is intuitive — made for the `dummies' in all of us and the software that one has to copy on the PC, loads within a minute or two without hassle. It works with both Windows and Linux PCs and uses the Universal Serial Bus (USB) socket to latch on. .

Natesh Mani, Executive Director of the New Office Group at Xerox India, says the company would like to drive the transition from inkjets to lasers in India.

To make this happen, it is apparently prepared to foray into the mass market laser "maidan,' way below present price points, facing customers with a choice between laser and inkjet, give or take a few hundred rupees.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail