Hardware
Measuring 41 x 38.9 x 22.7 cm and weighing 10.7 Kg, the 6015 NI is a compact machine. Covered in white plastic, little effort has been made with the design – it's an enterprise model after all. Some members of the editorial team have termed it a network administrator's model and, indeed, it's nothing like the recent general consumer machines on which navigation is easy, fluid and intuitive. Lots of buttons and a lot of information is concentrated on the front of this multifunction printer. The wi-fi would benefit from being simpler to configure. It doesn’t look for a network itself. You have to enter its name with the help of a physical keyboard, which is rather laborious and impractical.
Front: mixture of loads of buttons and an 8 cm black and white screen
Even though businesses often need a printer with a dual loader (to combine ordinary and headed paper), here you have to make do with a single loader with a 160-page capacity. Don’t look for a card reader or a double-sided feature, as you won’t find them, which is a shame for a printer designed for the enterprise segment. The printer drivers do however cover all the bases: Mac, Windows and Linux.
The paper loader: 160 pages
On the side, you’ll find four separated cartridges that are very easy to access.
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Speed
Although lasers are known for being particularly fast (especially in comparison to inkjets), this model drags its feet a bit. 16 pages per minute (ppm) black & white and 12 ppm colour is some way behind the 30 ppm you get on the Brother MFC-9970CDW for example..jpg)
Quality
The colour prints are precise, sharp and accurate. Lines are reproduced down to the smallest detail and legibility of our test document is perfect. The deltaE 94 reading however shows colour accuracy to be rather relative with a tendency towards yellow. The colour shading on the graph is well reproduced though the print head is visible on black & white prints. The overall quality looks good, better in colour.
Compare the images in the face-off
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Average deltaE 94 (colour difference): 8.1
The higher the value, the lower the accuracy.
For comparison, good screens score under 3.
Scanner and copier
Colour copies take 44 seconds and black & white take 21 seconds to print. This is pretty much what you’d expect on a general consumer machine but we expected better from a laser printer designed for pro use. For comparison, the Brother MFC-9970CDW (4-in-1 laser colour) prints a colour copy in 13 seconds and a black & white in 11. The deltaE 94 shows a rather high colour difference, especially with respect to light and grey tones.
Average deltaE 94 (colour difference): 8.1
Energy consumption & Noise levels
The printer consumes 6 Watts in standby and 220 Watts when printing. Although these values are relatively low for a laser, they are still too high. To compare with the Brother again, it only consumes 1W in standby. The Xerox is also still quite noisy when printing, with 53 dB(A) recorded on the sonometre.
Cost per page: 17.9 pence
Only one cartridge size is available: standard. You’ll get less pages out of these cartridges than their Epson or Brother equivalents. Moreover the starter cartridges are only half full and will only give 500 pages. Why be so mean?| Cartridge | Price | ISO lifespan | Cost per page |
| 106R01630 (black) | £58 | 2000 | 2.9 pence |
| 106R01627 (cyan) | £50 | 1000 | 5 pence |
| 106R01628 (magenta) | £50 | 1000 | 5 pence |
| 106R01629 (yellow) | £50 | 1000 | 5 pence |
Pros
- USB, wi-fi, Ethernet
- Compact
- Mac, Windows and Linux compatible
Cons
- High cost per page
- Not very intuitive
- Just the standard size cartridge available
- A single paper loader
- No double-sided, no card reader
- Start-up cartridges come only half-full
Conclusion
Here’s a relatively cheap, all-round model. Although this all-in-one is essentially aimed at the pro sector, it will be better suited to network administrators than your average user.
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