8570DN - Color Printer - Color - Ink-jet - Color: Up To 40 Pages/min, Black: Up

Product Description

Xerox ColorQube 8570DN Solid Ink Printer - Color - Plain Paper Print - Desktop 8570/DN 749

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 26 x 21 x 21 inches ; 75 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 75 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B004813AXG
• Item model number: 8570/DN
  

Price : $545.00
You Save : $566.50 (58%)

List Price : $979.00

Technical Details

• Sold Individually

Customer Reviews

I have had this printer for a few weeks and I am still learning the pros and cons. I bought this machine as a test because it is so similar to the 8870. I had been thinking of leasing the 8870 but I did not want to commit to a long-term lease and a big expense when the product might not work out for me.

So far the 8570 has been a mixed bag. It can be fast, but it also can be slow. It is the noisiest printer I have ever seen (or heard). It almost never has paper jams. One time it jammed after I yanked open the paper feed tray to try to stop the print job (use the red button to cancel the job). At the time the printer was printing random characters, also known as gobbledygook. Not sure why it was printing gobbledygook. Something weird with my computer maybe. It is environmentally friendly regarding cartridges, but it really should be left on all the time or you risk wasting a lot of ink. At least it has a low-power sleep mode (43 watts I believe).

It can be very fast at duplex printing (both sides). My tests show it can spit out black and white duplex sheets at up to 13 per minute in "standard" mode. That makes it almost twice as fast as some of the faster desktop laser printers on the market. In the "enhanced" mode, it seems to be able to print at about 11 double-sided sheets per minute.

However, it will slow down to about four or five sheets per minute when printing large documents (hundreds of pages). The Xerox support site explains that this is to prevent overheating.

The noise is a real issue. I tried putting it in my living room. My wife immediately complained. She said the living room sounded like a factory. I tried moving it downstairs to a closet at the foot of the stairs. We could still hear it upstairs and I had to move it into a downstairs bedroom. At least it only really makes a lot of noise while printing. In sleep mode it is quiet.

The ink seems very expensive. The starter ink (four cubes - one small cube of each color) enabled me to print about 1100 two-sided black and white sheets 8.5 x 11" before I was notified that the black ink was getting low. I have only done a dozen or so color test prints and the color ink is already running out. I believe that a lot of ink was wasted by the process of shutting down and moving the machine three or four times. A certain amount of ink is purged during the lengthy half-hour shut-down process. Also, I believe some of the color ink is being used while printing black and white pages. After my initial testing I noticed a print setting for black and white printing that probably should be used for black and white jobs. But I find that when using this black and white print setting, the black ink is used up more quickly on black and white jobs. By my reckoning, I'm paying at least 3.5 cents per print or about 7 cents per two-sided sheet, not counting the cost of the paper. For my calculations, I tried to estimate the amount of ink I wasted by turning the machine off and on, and did not count that toward my costs. I should also note that my black and white documents are dense with text and illustrations, and many of my print-outs were on legal-size paper. Nonetheless, my actual cost could be higher if my math or estimates are off. One thing I have not factored in is the cost of the maintenance kit. Also, if you print documents with a lot of color, your cost could easily be three or four times my estimated costs. The color ink cubes cost twice as much as the black and white cubes. I am getting sticker shock as I look at buying more ink. This is not acceptable for my purposes (which include trying to be profitable). However, the seller who sold me this item (not through Amazon) has offered me a pay-per-print option in which ink is supplied as part of the deal. Meanwhile, a local Xerox leasing agent has offered to lease me a similar machine (8870) with an even lower cost pay-per-print arrangement included. I am definitely going to look into this.

If you start running out of one color of ink (other than black), the machine will stop. It can maybe be coaxed to continue printing black and white by pushing buttons on the control panel. But if you have to turn off the machine and restart it while it is low one color of ink, it may be impossible to resume printing until you get the ink. The good news is that Xerox seems very fast about shipping the ink. The machine wants to print some color test pages every time it is started. But this can be turned off using the menu on the front cover.

One thing I like about this printer is the quality of the printed pages. Standard mode provides acceptable text and line-art quality at fast speeds. If you look with magnification, you can see that Standard mode is not quite as crisp as Enhanced mode. But to the naked eye they are pretty darn close. The other thing I notice is that in Standard mode, the solid blocks of black in illustrations are not as deep and rich as you might prefer. To get the deeper black, you need to use the Enhanced mode. Undoubtedly, this uses more of the expensive ink.

As with other inkjet type printers, the pages come out flat. Laser printers will curl the paper. One of the benefits of a flat page is that it is much easier to jog the paper. This is great if you are printing a lot of big documents.

I have not done much color printing, but from what I have seen color printouts are fast and look good. The ink adheres well to plain paper, and is not prone to melting, even if pages are left in a sunny window. (Fading in sunlight might be a problem though based on other reviews I have read.) The one problem I have noticed with color printing is that on some glossy papers or cardstocks, the image is easily marred by scratches. Rubbing a fingernail across the page can be enough to produce a visible scratch. Xerox may sell specialty photo papers that reduce or eliminate such problems.

I have been printing with a USB cable from Windows XP. But the printer is really designed for use on a network with an Ethernet cable so that everyone in a small office can use it. It has several administrative features that don't work with a USB cable, though the basic functionality is there. Be sure to download and install the latest firmware. I have found Xerox to have above average technical support by phone.

So to summarize:

PROS:

Fast duplex printing on shorter jobs, especially in Standard mode.

Consistent print quality with few paper handling problems.

Flat pages that are not curled.

Nice looking printouts in color or black and white.

No need for drums or toner cartridges.

CONS:

Noisy.

Expensive ink. (Look into pay-per-print pricing programs or leasing programs that may be cheaper.)

Must be left on all the time.

Slows down dramatically on large print jobs of more than a few hundred pages. (Just when fast printing would seem most desirable!

Update: I have sold the 8570 and leased the very similar 8870. After a month or so, I am happy so far, but then all my ink and supplies are included with the price of the lease. I have learned a few more things about these printers. The biggest surprise is that the maintenance kit is a large rubber roller in a plastic tray that must be removed and exchanged for a new one periodically. This is very easy to do. Just takes a few seconds. The roller is about the size of a small toner cartridge for a desktop printer. I'm guessing that the standard maintenance kit has to be replaced after every 10,000 print-outs. Maybe its 20,000. There may be an extended capacity maintenance kit. So instead of going through two to four toner cartridges a month, I am going through two maintenance kits a month (and a dozen or more ink cubes). And unlike toner cartridges which can be refilled or recycled locally, options are more limited for the old maintenance kit. If I want to recycle it, I can send it back to Xerox, at my own expense. Not sure if it is worth it because I'm not sure to what extent Xerox will actually recycle it. With its soft rubber roller dampened with cleaning solution, it does not seem very recyclable. So much for being more environmentally friendly than other printers!

The 8870 seems to differ from the 8570 only in the size of the ink cubes that it accepts. They are bigger on the 8870, and priced differently, so that the cost-per-print should be much less than with the 8570, even if you are not leasing the machine. But I recommend leasing. It seems to be the cost-effective no-hassle way to go.

I am in love with the print quality and the flat print-outs. And I'm not sure about this, but the 8870 does not seem to slow down as much or as early in the print job as the 8570. I should really time the printer on a big job to see what is going on with the speed. Paper handling is super reliable. We routinely feed paper through the machine that has been damaged in transit. Even paper with bent corners goes through the machine without a problem.

I had one problem with a light streak on the paper, due to an ink jet becoming clogged. This happened after I was forced to turn off the machine unceremoniously for a few seconds. (Never turn it off unless you really, really have to. And then go through the shut-down procedure.) But I was able to go through the cleaning procedure in about 15 minutes, and thus unclogged the ink jet. I think the reason I shut down was that the machine had frozen up due to a software glitch. Shutting down momentarily cleared the glitch. This has only happened once.

I purchased this printer locally in OKC, OK on July 1 so I could play "20 questions" and run samples of my own files on a flash drive. It was an extremely pleasant experience. However, the current price at PC Nation is better what I paid initially.

The printer uses solid ink that is melted rather than toner or ink that is stored in a liquid state. The printer ships with very small partial blocks installed and one full block / stick of each color (CYMK) in a separate package. The printer holds up to 3 blocks each color at a time. When I first turned on the printer (with full blocks added) two read at 30% full and two at 40%. After 600+ printouts, I'm reading 30% for each; must report in 10% increments.

The printer was purchased to replace both an aging HP LJ4 (purchased for $1100 circa 1992) and an HP PhotoSmart 7350. The LJ could no longer feed from the bypass tray except one at a time and toner was starting to flake off when printing on card-stock or envelopes. The photosmart works well, but is very slow and cartridges are expensive.

I am running the printer on a home network of three computers: 1 Win 7 laptop, 1 Win 7 desktop and 1 Win XP Pro desktop. I'm using a wired LAN connection to my DSL Router. This is great as the other printers were using a centronics parallel port (remember those?) and a USB port on the XP machine, so when it was down, noone could print. The printer is for home use (2 adults, 2 middle schoolers, 1 high schooler) and for printing correspondence for my KofC council. Once placed and turned on, it has not been powered down to conserve ink.

PROS: Text is crisp. I have my monitor calibrated using Spyder 3 and printed images perfectly match the colors of photos in LightRoom. The inkjet produces a sharper image on photo paper, but the color is better with 8570 and printing is much quicker with the 8570; great for proofs before taking the photos to a processor. The image printouts are certainly good enough for general correspondence and school reports. Greatly appreciate having built-in duplex. The vendor was able to print on windowed envelopes, but I haven't tried and the documentation discourages the practice. Solid ink feels slightly raised, so output seems more impressive. Green: uses less power than HP LJ 4 and the solid ink has far less packaging. As you adjust Tray 1 width, the printer automatically recognizes going from 8.5 x 11 to Commercial 10 envelope and gives you an option to override.

CONS: As others have mentioned, the printer is loud, more so than the HP 4 and definitely more than the inkjet, hence the knock of a star. The envelopes that I use get a crease at the fold of the flap, beginning near the center of the fold edge reaching about 1 mm at the corner of the envelope; no-biggie, but not perfect. Ink is expensive, but it is still less expensive than the inkjet's; you just have sticker-shock as the solid ink lasts longer so you are actually "buying more" at one time. About 4-5 minutes to wake up from "deep sleep", but fast once it gets going. Also as mentioned by another reviewer, ink flakes off of photo-paper; doesn't have that issue with other paper.

I was able to get $150 for my HP LJ as a trade-in through Xerox's "Sure it Works" program. For supplies, my vendor set me up with a Xerox eConcierge account; free extended warranty support with two supply orders through it. I plan on splitting an order of ink to spread out the cost a little and to qualify for the warranty.

Bottom line: I wish I had the printer sooner, especially with the Knights work. Great for general (lower volume) use, but is not meant to be a photo-only printer. If you have higher print volume, recommend the 8870 which is higher in price initially, but has less expensive color ink.