DocuPrint races through print jobs and wins every time

By GCN

| June 7, 2000

The Xerox DocuPrint N2825 might not look like a racehorse printer at 60 pounds, 16 inches tall and 20 inches wide. But once you lug this laser Clydesdale to the print station, it races through network printing jobs at 28 pages per minute.

The printer's 200-MHz RISC processor and Xerox-specific coprocessor are backed up by 32M of RAM that can be upgraded to 192M. An optional 2G hard drive can store very large documents sent to the print cache. With so much on-board hardware, the N2825 probably is more powerful than some of the client computers that send it jobs.The primary paper tray holds up to 500 sheets'a standard pack of office-sized paper. It also can accommodate custom sizes, mostly smaller ones. The printer is rated from standard bond up to 110-pound card stock. I put through a few sheets of card stock, and they came out fine.The secondary tray is for larger paper sizes. Though it holds only 150 sheets, it extends for legal and ledger paper. Because it sticks out and takes up extra desktop real estate, you should set the printer back far enough that people don't accidentally bump the extended tray.The N2825 comes with a 10/100Base-T Ethernet card. A single user can also operate the printer via a Universal Serial Bus or parallel cable. Optional interfaces are available to set up a server for the printer, but that's unnecessary unless more than about 50 people will share it.The monochrome output is easy to read and does not suffer from the too-light toner deposition I have seen from similar units. The N2825 also does a good job of shading colored text and graphics. A toner cartridge supposedly will last for 17,000 uses, assuming the average page has about 5 percent ink coverage. I ran several hundred pages through, and the last looked as good as the first.The only slow leg in the N2825's speed marathon comes in sleep mode. It takes a relatively long time to warm up again'50 to 55 seconds'after going to sleep.The N2825 is fairly quiet for a network printer. I did have initial trouble with its print driver, partly because Xerox did not send the final version with my preproduction test unit. Even when I had the final driver, my test computer still tried to reinstall the printer each time I rebooted. After I hit cancel once, however, the new-device message never came back. Xerox should fix this minor annoyance.The N2825 is definitely worth its weight for speedy network printing, and that is saying a lot for this gravity-challenged unit.

By John Breeden II

GCN Staff

The Xerox DocuPrint N2825 might not look like a racehorse printer at 60 pounds, 16 inches tall and 20 inches wide. But once you lug this laser Clydesdale to the print station, it races through network printing jobs at 28 pages per minute.

The N2825 gives a lot of bang for the buck. Priced at $1,899, it performs better than many laser printers costing twice as much. The pages fly into the top bin at a rate of one every 2.1 seconds. Most documents will be done by the time you can walk over to pick them up.

Like a champion sprinter, the N2825 not only is fast once it gets going, it's also lightning-quick out of the gate. Except when starting from sleep mode, it never took longer than 10 seconds to begin printing once I sent data its way.

The longest it ever took was 9.5 seconds when crunching a minutely detailed Adobe Portable Document Format specification sheet.

Good breeding

	Box Score
DocuPrint N2825 Fast network laser printer Xerox Corp.; Stamford, Conn.; tel. 800-439-3769 www.xerox.com Price: $1,899 + Lightning-fast at 28 ppm + High-end processor built in + Large paper capacity ' Long wake-up time

Enough already

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