At the back are sockets for USB and 10/100 Ethernet, both of which are standard. Wireless networking is available as an option – but there's no legacy support for parallel printing – and you can add a 40GB hard drive for local storage. The Phaser 6280V/DN comes with genuine Adobe Postscript Level 3 and PCL 6 in emulation and there are drivers for Windows, OS X and a CUPS driver for Linux.

A 100-sheet multi-purpose tray hides behind the large front cover

Xerox rates the machine as a 30ppm black and 25ppm colour printer but, as usual, we didn't see these speeds in our real-world tests. A five-page black text document took 18 seconds to produce, a speed of just under 17ppm and when we increased the page count to 20, the speed went up to 23.5ppm, still some way short of the headline figure.

Interestingly, though, when we sent the same 20-page document as a duplex job, it only took 1:11, which again is just under 17spm. This is unusual, as duplexing normally drops print speed to around half that of a simplex document.

One of the reasons behind this unusually quick duplex speed could be that the printer takes in sheets in pairs, as far as possible, duplexing one immediately after the other. If your print job isn't an exact multiple of four sides, of course, this technique breaks down a little, but for the bulk of duplex jobs the two-at-a-time system appears to pay off in print speed.

Colour print is slightly slower than duplex, with our five-page colour document taking 22 seconds, a speed of 13.6ppm. The final speed test, for a 15 x 10cm photo print on an A4 sheet, completed in 34 seconds. Print quality is generally very good. Black text is sharp and dense, with little sign of jaggies in its 600dpi print and no sign of any misplaced toner.

Standard and high-capacity cartridges are available

Colour graphics also look good with bright, sharp graphs and charts and good solid fills, with excellent registration of black text over colour. The four drum and toner cartridges are available in two capacities: 3,000 pages and 7,000 pages for standard and high-capacity black and 2,200 and 5,900 for colour. Using the high-yield consumables, which give better economy, produces page costs of 1.8p for black and 8.6p for colour.