The Fuji Xerox DocuPrint C3300DX colour laser printer offers decent performance at a reasonable price. Colour in documents sometimes suffers from inconsistencies, but its print speed, network capabilities and automatic duplex unit make it a big leap over its cheaper counterpart, the Fuji Xerox DocuPrint C2200.
The Fuji Xerox DocuPrint C3300DX is quite tall for a standalone colour laser printer. It is quick and easy to the access the vertically aligned toners through a front door panel, but the control panel and LCD display are at the top of the printer. This can be annoying if it is sitting on a desk.
The Fuji Xerox DocuPrint C3300DX can handle up to 700 A4 pages at a time through a paper cassette and multipurpose bypass tray, with an optional extra tray adding a further 550 sheets. This is complemented by a maximum duty monthly cycle of 70,000 pages, which means you will be able to conduct medium to high volume printing.
The printer's USB 2.0 and Ethernet connections can be connected simultaneously. The most commendable feature, however, is the inclusion of automatic duplex, which allows double-sided printing. Unfortunately, a 40GB hard drive is an optional extra. This means that to use the Secure Print function you will have to shell out more money.
Unlike many networked printers, you don't need to print a report to find out the IP address. The Fuji Xerox DocuPrint C3300DX displays the IP address on the LCD panel (though unfortunately this option is buried in a mound of other network-related options).
Once accessed, the Web-based interface of the DocuPrint C3300DX offers basic monitoring and workgroup administration options. You can also alter e-mail notifications and security settings (it supports both IP filtering and 802.1X authentication).
Fuji Xerox has bumped up print speeds slightly from the DocuPrint C2200, claiming that the DocuPrint C3300DX colour laser printer is capable of 30 pages per minute. In real-world testing this proved largely accurate. The DocuPrint C3300DX was able to print out the first page of a mono document in 12 seconds and we achieved an average rate of 31ppm when printing at 600x600dpi. Using the High Resolution setting, which prints at a 1200x1200dpi resolution during two passes, the printer’s speed halved to 15ppm.
Colour document print speeds are similar: 31ppm when using standard quality, though the first page took 15.2sec to come out. When using the High Resolution quality setting, the speed slowed to an average of 13.4ppm; this seemed to be caused by continual recalibration during printing.
The 1200x1200dpi resolution may slow printing but it improves results noticeably. Mono documents are bolder and easier to read, while colours in graphics and documents appear much more solid than when printing at 600dpi. Nevertheless, there are still some questionable aspects about the DocuPrint C3300DX's output.
Colours can be dull and are often inaccurate unless you experiment with the available colour balance profiles. Even then, there is still a noticeable amount of colour mis-registration when combined with text, causing white shadows on text characters. For producing professional documents, the DocuPrint C3300DX should serve well, though some experimentation may be required.
The inclusion of automatic duplexing along with decent print speeds and high print resolution make the Fuji Xerox DocuPrint C3300DX colour laser printer a decent buy for the networked office.