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Xerox Phaser 8500 Ink’s Unique Solid Design

The Xerox Phaser 8500 and Xerox 8550 are excellent printers for business networks. Both of these printers handle high volumes of information quickly, produce colour and black and white copies rapidly, and connect easily to most computer networks. But the most important part of a printer is its ink, and the Phaser 8500 ink is uniquely well-designed for consistency and high print quality.
The options available in Phaser printers should be known. Four versions of the 8500/8550 printers are available with different prices and qualities. All of them except 8500/N have duplex capabilities. The 8550/DX which is a higher end model and can hold and print large stacks of paper. Printing speed is also good. Lower end printers print around 24 pages per minute while the higher ones can reach up to 30 pages per minute
A similar but smaller printer in the same line in the Xerox Phaser 8560. It is intended for home and small office use, and thus has lesser capabilities than the 8500 and 8550. In particular, it prints more slowly however its ink has the same high quality as the business printers, and it is considerably less costly to buy and operate.
As stated earlier, Phaser 8500 ink is what truly sets these printers apart. Xerox is the only company to develop and provide solid ink for their printers.  This enables it to print in a single pass. Single pass technology prevents the misalignment of the four ink colours that is commonly seen in traditional inkjet printers. This also cuts down on printing time, as traditional printers require several passes, one for each ink colour.
Solid ink resists colour separation or layering within the cartridge. This creates consistent colour throughout the life of the Xerox 8560 ink cartridge. Solid colour also tend to be more saturated and looks brighter. These inks are also environmentally accepted.
Phaser 8500 ink and Phaser 8560 ink may appear as prohibitively expensive, but with high quality compatible inks available from Stinkyinkshop the actual running costs of the printers are reasonable - especially when the fact that there is no environmental hangover from using these - i.e. no cartridges to dispose of.

When Xerox bought Tektronix some years back they continued to develop and produce office printers utilising the Tektronix technology of Melting Wax sticks. Indeed we have got a Xerox 8400 colour inkjet printer in our office, and it provides sterling service with high quality output. The only drawback that we can see is because the printer sprays a wax output right across the page it means that you can’t write on it afterwards, the wax actually clogs the roller ball in a standard Roller Ball pen.

Now however with new developments in the print head technology, the company is promising to roll out consumer desktop products within a year. I personally think this is a cracking idea if it is priced to enable consumers to buy both the printer and the inks. Solid ink is different to the usual inkjet cartridges that you are used to which normally incorporate liquid ink in a tank, sometimes up to 5 different colours in one tank. Solid ink comes as a moulded wax cube, each individual colour is moulded individually and you drop them into the appropriate slots in the printer (don’t ask - yes I have put them into the wrong ones!). The print head then melts the wax at between 70 -100 deg’s C and the melted ink is then sprayed onto a Drum unit for transfer onto paper - sounds simple and produces a very nice gloss finish onto ordinary 80gsm copier paper.

The other big advantage to this technology over the Inkjet/Laser technology is that it is much more environmentally friendly. The outer packaging is much smaller, there is no cartridge as the ink is moulded into its container and finally there is no empty cartridge to dispose of when the ink runs out.

Now though with the development of new heads the technology should be available to the consumer end of the market place soon, watch this space for details