Xerox's DocuPrint 4517mp: Fast, Affordable Workgroup Printing

Alfred Poor

Departmental laser printers are made to meet the demands of multiple users, but few can match the flexibility and compact design of Xerox Corp.'s DocuPrint 4517mp. And at an estimated street price of $3,200, the DocuPrint 4517mp is also an impressive value.

The basic specifications are those you might expect for a shared printer: a 17-page-per-minute (17-ppm) print engine, a 250-sheet standard paper tray and a 100-sheet manual-feed tray, and 600-dot-per-inch (600-dpi) resolution. Paper handling can be expanded by adding one or two optional 500-sheet paper trays and a 500-sheet offset tray. And later this year, you can get an optional locking, ten-drawer mailbox/collator (see the sidebar "Can Your Printer Keep a Secret?").

The real pluses of the DocuPrint 4517mp become evident when you look deeper. Like many departmental lasers, the DocuPrint 4517mp offers duplex printing as an option. The difference is that the Xerox printer's duplex unit is very small, can be installed by the average user in just minutes, and sells for less than $400.

The DocuPrint 4517mp we tested adds Adobe PostScript Level 2 support, 6MB of memory, and an Ethernet interface (LocalTalk and Token-Ring are optional). For network installations, the printer ships with Document Services for Printing (DS/P) Version 2.0, a Windows application that allows users and network administrators to control multiple printers.

The printer accepts an optional hard disk and is equipped with two PC Card slots, which can be used to store fonts, forms, or other print macros, such as signatures or logos.

We tested the DocuPrint 4517mp with the optional duplex and an additional 4MB of memory (a total of 10MB). This configuration carries an estimated street price of $3,200.

On our standard Print Speed test, the printer posted a speed of 13.9 ppm under PCL and 13.8 ppm using PostScript--competitive scores for a 600-dpi printer in this class. The DocuPrint 4517mp fared equally well on the CorelDraw graphics test page, achieving ratings of 2.4 graphics pages per minute for PCL and 1.7 gppm for PostScript.

Print quality was well above average. The DocuPrint 4517mp incorporates DP-Tek's TrueRes image enhancement technology to smooth the jagged edges for text and line art, plus Xerox's Quad Dot technology, which improves the quality of gray-scale images. The TrueRes feature successfully smoothed text even when printing fonts in small point sizes, and gray-scale images demonstrated fine, smooth dithering. Occasionally, we noticed some faded streaks in large areas of solid black.

The printer is rated for a maximum of 50,000 pages a month. The unified toner/drum cartridge is rated for 10,000 pages at 5 percent coverage, and the other service component, the fuser, is rated for 200,000 pages. The unit can handle paper up to legal size and can also accept transparencies and labels.

If you're looking for a fast and flexible network printer, the DocuPrint 4517mp is a strong candidate.

DocuPrint 4517mp. Estimated street price: $3,200. Requires: 6MB RAM, Microsoft Windows 3.1 or later, Windows 95, or Windows NT. Xerox Corp., El Segundo, CA; 800-349-3769; http:// www.xerox.com.

Can Your Printer Keep a Secret?

Networked printers are an efficient way to provide fast, high-quality output for workgroups or entire departments. But they afford little privacy from prying eyes.

Now Xerox has come up with a solution for the DocuPrint 4517 series: an optional mailbox/collator that combines the advantages of a network workhorse with the privacy of a personal printer. Multibin output trays are nothing new, but Xerox's mailbox/collator has ten locking trays, which can be assigned individual passwords so that users can send their print jobs to their own secure output bins. In addition to keeping your documents out of plain view, the mailbox/collator eliminates the tedious task of sifting through a crammed output tray to locate your document.

You can also assign passwords to some bins and leave others unlocked for general use. Or the unit can be configured to collate multiple copies. An LED on the front panel identifies which bins are locked or unlocked.

The mailbox/collator mounts on top of the DocuPrint 4517 models, preserving the printers' modest footprint. The $1,099 option was not ready in time for this evaluation, but Xerox says it should be available shortly.

--AP

Copyright (c) 1996 Ziff-Davis Publishing Company