Phaser 7300N

The Fuji Xerox Phaser 7300N performed well almost across the board, delivering fast speeds and generally good print quality in our tests. It's also a behemoth, weighing 68kg and measuring 67cm wide and 63cm deep. But its sizable girth allows it to handle a variety of paper sizes, including tabloid and wide-format banners.

The 7300N outshines most of its opponents in text speed, spitting out sheets at 24.5 pages per minute. It also clocked high speeds for colour graphics in our tests, printing our test pages at 5.5ppm. The model we saw came equipped with a healthy 192MB of RAM; the memory is expandable up to 512MB.

Though the 7300N uses an LED rather than a laser to place the image on the printer drum, the difference will be transparent to users. In addition to swift printing speeds, the 7300N earned some great scores for print quality. Like most lasers it printed text extremely well, with dark, sharp letters. We were also impressed with its ability to clearly separate even very narrow parallel lines. Our test black-and-white photograph had a choppy texture but showed good detail. The device had the most trouble printing colour graphics, which had a few dark, muted colours and murky detail in sections; the 7300N reproduced detail better than colour, but we found adjusting the colour in the driver easy.

The printer has a fair number of paper-handling options. The 650-sheet capacity may not be enough for large offices with high-volume printing needs, but you can expand the unit to a maximum of 2850 sheets (paper tray options include a 550-sheet tray and a 1650-sheet tray). An optional 10GB hard drive can store numerous jobs for later printing.

Toner cartridges are available for cyan, magenta, yellow and black, in both standard (up to 7500 pages) and high-capacity (up to 15,000 pages). Xerox rates the imaging units (there's one for each colour) to last for up to 30,000 pages.