“The Macintosh installer residing on the Phaser 860 CD will install the Phaser 860 PPD’s into the appropriate folder for Mac OS X,” Steffen Nelson, product marketing manager, Xerox office printing business told MacCentral. The installed PPD’s will be used by the Mac OS X LaserWriter driver.”
Due to limitations in the current Mac OS X LaserWriter driver, the PPD will not parse printer unique features such as print quality and job type from the PPD. Hopefully Apple will have this fixed in the next OS X update.
The Phaser 860 prints at 16 pages per minute (ppm) in color, which is over three times faster than the closest competing color laser printer from Hewlett-Packard, according to Xerox. It also boasts a 250MHz processor and has a 10-second first-page-out time.
Xerox has introduced ColorStix II Solid Ink technology in the Phaser 860. ColorStix II provides brilliant color on any type of paper, with smooth transitions and fills, as well as sharper images, according to the company. The easy-to-load ColorStix II ink allows on-the-fly replacement so print jobs do not have to be interrupted to replace ink.
The Phaser 860 supports TekColor Dynamic Color Correction, ColorSync, ICC color press profiles, Pantone certification and sRGB color matching. The 860 allows the transfer of a full color image to paper in a single pass.
The printer features 64MB of RAM standard (expandable up to 256 MB); expanded media flexibility including legal size paper and support of up to 110-lb. index stock; automatic two-sided printing; 10/100 BaseT Ethernet and Auto Install for easy networkability; and 1200 dpi print resolution
The 860 is compatible with Apple EtherTalk (OS 8.x, 9.x) and Mac OS X. The estimated retail price of the Phaser 860 starts at US$1,999.