Xerox M750 Reviews and Information

After buying myself a cheap digital camera, the dinky Digital Dream Co. L’espion I needed a printer capable of transferring my pictures from my computer onto paper, better than my aging Hewlett Packard Deskjet 400 was capable of. I was very tempted by some of the cheap but fairly well reviewed Lexmark printers. One shop were able to sell them at an amazing £30, with a specification similar to some of the well known brands. I was very tempted, until I looked into the running costs of such a machine. The original Lexmark cartridges were £25.99 for a black cartridge and £27.99 for a colour cartridge. This to me seemed ridiculous, as you could buy another printer for nearly the same money!
I then trusted the reliability of Hewlett Packard, as my Deskjet 400 had served me well without any problems at all. The colour cartridges for my Deskjet were quite expensive, but the colour printing was nowhere near photographic quality. The black and white printing however was quick and near perfect. I investigated a couple of the Hewlett Packard printers that were nearing the one hundred pound mark. For a day or two I forgot about it, until that was I stumbled upon a website I hadn’t visited for a while, Novatech.co.uk. On their homepage was a limited offer, they were clearing their stock of Xerox M750 inkjet printers. What was so amazing was the price was under £40. I realised that this was going to be a well built and hopefully reliable printer, being made by the Xerox company, known worldwide for their wide range of printing machines and copiers.

After reading all of the information on the M750 provided on the site, my mind was made up. I had one last thing to check before I purchased my new printer. I thought that I might be faced with the same problem as I had encountered with the Lexmark, cheap purchase price, but high running costs. The manufacturers sometimes sell their printers cheaply, even at a loss, knowing they will make money overtime by selling the consumables. I buy cheaper replacement cartridges from a small internet company based in Yorkshire called Boxshift. I had checked for Lexmark cartridges in their site, but from all the research I did, I discovered that so far there are no cheaper alternatives, people are forced to buy original, EXPENSIVE Lexmark cartridges! This however was not the case with the Xerox M750 I was planning to buy.
The Xerox M750 has separate ink tanks, so if for instance you use vast amounts of yellow ink, you will not be wasting all of the cyan and magenta when you replace the colour cartridge, as they are separate. I was able to buy the separate ink tanks for only £3.99 each. The high capacity black cartridge was only £4.99. These low running cost were what convinced me that this printer was a good buy. I planned to do a lot of colour printing with it, so it would be no use wasting so much ink and paying high costs for replacement cartridges. Also I wanted all of the cartridges to be installed at the same time, as with my old Deskjet I had to swap them over each time I wanted to print in colour, or waste the colour cartridge while using it to print in black. There are four separate print heads, with clearly marked labels as to where to put each tank. They just clip in, then you press them down.

Since I’ve had my printer, (February 2002) I have not needed to change the black cartridge and considering that I do a lot of black and white printing for college work and things from the internet, it appear to last well. I have only recently changed the colour cartridges, again they have had a lot of use but seem to have lasted well. Xerox claim to have developed an intelligent system called ‘InkLogic’ which manages the colour and ink, trying it’s best to save ink where possible.
The M750 cost me £39.97 including VAT. Which I consider to be a very cheap printer, especially as postage and packaging was free for such a bulky item, due to the fact I had ordered online. It arrived promptly, in a large, I mean huge box, which protected the printer well. I must say, that on first impressions the printer seemed much larger than I had imagined, despite checking the dimensions against my old Deskjet before purchasing it.

I unwrapped all of the separately packaged items from the box, such as power cables, printer tray, print heads, cartridges (all four) etc. I checked the manual and pieced it all together very quickly. I ran the CD that was supplied, which installed the necessary drivers and small piece of printing management software provided by Xerox. I was then ready to set it up.
Due to the size of the M750, I had to resort to landing it on top of my stereo, as it would not fit on my desk. As it automatically switched on when the setup program asked it to, the first thing that struck me was how noisy it was. I thought my old Deskjet was noisy, as it clattered and whirred along, but the M750 really is a loud printer. I certainly try to avoid using it late at night or early in the morning, to avoid disturbing other members of the family! The stated noise level is 47 decibels. The setup guided me through the manual print head alignment, to make sure that you don’t get any lines or gaps in the printing. Some machines do this automatically, but personally, I prefer the manual method, as it doesn’t take too long, but at least you are sure it is correct. It prints several dots, lines and crosses, you have to check that they line up with certain letters. If not make the necessary changes corresponding to the incorrect number and try again. Once this process is complete you’re ready to print.

The printer tray is mounted on the front and will hold a huge stack of paper, up to 150 sheets. There is a green see through cover that clips on top of it to keep the dust out, which has a pull out arm with a lift up stop on it to catch the completed prints. This I consider to be a very rushed after thought, as the lift up stop broke the second time I used it. This is the only part of the Xerox that felt cheap or flimsy though. I have glued and taped it in place, as I will always require it in that position.
You can always bypass the paper tray, by feeding a continuous stream of paper in the bypass tray for banners, or single sheets. This is located at the rear of the printer, above the rear access door, where you can clear paper jams. So far I have never had any paper jam in the printer, but that used to be a real problem with my old Hewlett Packard Deskjet.

You can also feed envelopes in though the rear bypass tray, or through the normal front mounted paper tray. The main paper tray is best used for envelopes or cards if you have a lot of them to print at once, otherwise it is easier to use the bypass tray, to save removing the paper from the main tray, adjusting the sliders and replacing the lid. There is a switch to turn on the side of the printer for when you are using thick media or envelopes, the software often prompts you to do this when you make any changes.
I have my M750 connected on the parallel port, as it runs via my scanner, but I did have problems with the USB port on the printer. I believe it to only be a fault with my own printer, though it could actually be the famous dodgy PC World USB hub causing problems AGAIN! I was offered a replacement after contacting Xerox customer support, I decided though that it would be too much hassle and I could cope with using it on the parallel port.

There are only two main buttons on the Xerox M750, the on/off button and the paper feed button. There are three lights/L.E.D.s. One is the green power and status light. This flashes when it is receiving data or is carrying out a cleaning process. The other light is the printer feed light and the third red light is for when the lid is open or an error has occurred.
On the odd occasion I have had the following problem with the printer, which I assume is due to a power surge when I switch off my PC and other appliances, as I do not have a surge protected plug, yet! The printer switches itself on, but when you switch it off, after a few seconds it will switch back on and the power light will blink continuously. You can switch it off by holding the power button, but the next time you turn it on, it will not function properly. To overcome this you simply disconnect it from the mains and turn it on, for a couple of minutes it will clean the print heads and set itself up again.

The printer needs to be plugged in all of the time to receive a continuous power supply, I believe this is to keep the print heads and ink tanks from drying up as it is a Thermal Ink Jet Printer.
The M750 is not, like many models, restricted to the amount of an A4 page it can print on. It is capable of printing right to the edge of the page. This makes A4 pictures look a lot better.

The printer is quite quick, a quoted 10 pages per minute in black and white and 6 pages per minute in colour. On my old PC it is still quite quick, but uses quite a lot of the free RAM. The resolution is 1200 x 1200 dots per inch.
The minimum system requirements are 32MB RAM recommended, 16MB minimum, 486-66MHz Operating System Windows 95/98, NT4.0, Windows 2000. The printer has onboard memory of 2MB. It functions on both parallel and USB ports, though Xerox do not supply either of the cables.

The small printer management program supplied on the software CD does not change the way in which you print. It just displays the progress of the print job, the ink levels of the cartridges and will warn you when they need replacing. From this program you can align, clean and carry out maintenance. You can also change the page orientation, paper type, size, print quality etc. It is easy to use and the colour settings are very easy to change.
Xerox have developed a system called eXpress printing, where quality is not compromised, but is speeds up the printing. You can save you different presets, such as envelopes, posters, banners and photographs.

Now that I had the printer capable of printing photographic quality prints, I decided to try using some (expensive) glossy photo paper. It was well over £5 for 20 sheets, but if you fit plenty on each sheet, it soon works out cheaper than getting normal photos developed. I was very impressed with the results from the Xerox M750. The colours are true to the screen and I actually managed to scan and reproduce several photos, I was even hard pushed to tell the difference between the originals and the copies! It slows the printer down dramatically, but although the prints are not as good as proper prints, they are a cheaper alternative, which suit my needs and work well for digital camera users. The paper is easy to scratch though. The printer though does an outstanding job, you just have to remember to load the paper the right side up and change the settings before you actually print the pictures. I have used my photo imaging software to arrange all of the pictures so that they fit on one page, minimising the wasted paper.
To sum up this short review, (by my standards!!) this printer was exceptional value for money, is perfect for my needs. It is incredibly cheap to run, even on the original Xerox cartridges, due to the separate ink tanks and ink saving printing technology. It is quite fast, easy to setup and the software is not obtrusive, but is there when you need to make changes to the setup and printing. It will guide you through changing ink cartridges and print heads, also the status window will tell you as much as it can about errors.

Currently PC World (I cannot stand this shop, as nothing I have ever bought from here has worked first time, but that is another opinion!) are running a special web offer on the Xerox M760 DocuPrint, which is basically the same as this model, but with slightly faster printing speeds I believe and a couple of added extras to the specification. The special offer price is £49.99. It is not a stylish looking printer, but is is not going to go out of fashion either! This is still cheap for a brand with such a good reputation and should suit many needs, from small office to home and occasional use.