Dazzling prints from the box

NEW FROM FUJI, the Xerox DocuPrint CP225w is an S-LED colour printer that assures good-quality copies at home or the office. Several types of wireless printing are available and the speed is an impressive 18 pages per minute in full colour.

The CP225w is quite compact for a laser printer – 397 x 398 x 246mm. Thanks to the wireless connection to your home office or home network, you can tuck it away in any corner with no elbow room lost.

I had no difficulty linking it to my home Wi-Fi router. I simply pressed the Wi-Fi-protected setup (WPS) buttons on the printer and on my Linksys X3500 router and the two automatically made friends.

Then I installed the printer driver on my notebook computer, and I was ready to print straight to the CP225w. The printer supports wireless protocols of up to IEEE802.11n.

It has an Ethernet port for using a 10 Base-T/100 Base-TX LAN cable to connect to your router. You can also connect the printer’s USB2.0 port to your computer. 

Being wireless makes printing from the CP225w convenient as well as fun. Transmit your pictures straight from any mobile phone or tablet computer that has the same Wi-Fi Direct technology or – thanks to Apple’s AirPrint protocol – from an iPad or iPhone. 

Google’s Cloud Print protocol is also supported, enabling transmission from anywhere in the world via a phone or tablet and your Google account (although this means living the printer switched on and router-connected while you travel).

The one aspect I found was quite complicated was linking the CP225w to my Cloud Print account.

First you switch on the printer’s Cloud Print function from its control menu and display panel. Then you have to use the Web-page-based CentreWare Internet Services function to change settings to ensure that the printer is linked to the Internet via the router.

CentreWare is accessible via a Web browser by typing in the IP address of the printer, as shown on its display panel. You’re then prompted to enter the administration login ID and password of the printer, which are provided in the manual and can be personalised later.

Now you can use the CentreWare page to register the CP225w with the Cloud Print server. And finally the printer spews out a QR code that you must scan using your phone or tablet to link the printer to your Google account. That was a lot of travelling just to get to the point where I could now “print from anywhere”.

The CP225w uses Fuji Xerox’s award-winning control technologies S-LED (Self-Scanning Light Emitting Diode) and DELCIS (Digitally-Enhanced Lighting Control Imaging System) to deliver accurate, high-imaging quality at a high printing resolution of 1,200x2,400 dots per inch.

The four-colour EA-Eco toner (comprising cyan, magenta, yellow and black) produces vivid colours and rich, deep blacks. If the cyan, magenta or yellow toners run out, you can still print in black and white.

Fuji Xerox says its ink toners are environmentally friendly, using EA (emulsion aggregation) technology that fuses the ink to the paper at a much lower temperature, reduces power consumption by up to 20 per cent, and cuts CO2 emissions by up to 35 per cent compared to conventional makes.

The CP225w performs quite well thanks to its 525MHz processor and 256 megabytes of memory. My colour prints came out beautifully on both plain and laser glossy paper, and text was sharp and clean on plain paper. The speed was acceptable for this type of printer, and anyway depends on the configuration and connection speed between the printer and router. Using a LAN cable might be best.

I printed out a colour PDF page from my notebook in 29 seconds. It took longer than that just to receive the data and set up the process before I could begin printing.

It took 1.56 minutes to print an A4-size photo from my phone using Cloud Print technology, and 3.15 minutes from my notebook. Printing a collage of four shots took 4.14 minutes. For these I used IJ 128-g Laser Glossy paper and the results were glossy and vivid, quite similar to what you get from a professional photo shop.

The Fuji Xerox DocuPrint CP225w has a suggested retail price of Bt7,990. The black toner costs Bt1,880, the cyan, magenta and yellow toners Bt1,880 and Bt1,288 each, depending on capacity.

 

Key Specs

 

- Print speed: 18ppm colour or monochrome

- First page out: 15 seconds colour, 12.5 monochrome

- Memory standard maximum: 256MB

- Print language or PDL (Page Description Language): PCL5e, PCL6, PostScript 3-compatible

- Duty cycle: 30,000 pages or five years

- Print resolution: 1200x2400dpi (Fuji Xerox Imaging Technology)

- Image processing: 525MHz

- Two-sided printing (duplex): Manual

- Media size: Paper tray – A4, B5, A5, Letter, Executive, Folio (215.9 x330.2mm), Legal, Envelope (Com-10/Monarch /DL /C5 ) 

- Custom size: Width 76.2 to 215.9mm, length 127 to 355.6mm

- Paper input capability: 150 sheets

- Paper output capability: 100 sheets face-down

- Connectivity: 10/100BaseT, USB2.0 (hi-speed), IEEE802.11b/g/n

- Dimensions: 397x398x246mm

- Weight: 12.4kg including toner cartridges