Xerox WorkCentre 7232 Review

The WorkCentre 7232 starts at the high price of $5949, and though it does include a large amount of features and a decent speed, I'm not so sure the price tag is justified. Let's look through everything the 7232 offers, and you can decide if it's the printer for you, or if it's better left in their warehouse.

The PPM rating (pages per minute) for black and white is an impressive 40 PPM (if you get the upgrade, normally it is 32, still a good speed). One problem I have is the color speed, which is a slim 10 PPM. Considering that most people willing to sink this much money into a printer are looking both for speed and great features, I think Xerox could have kicked up the color speed at least to 20, and even that is low. However, if you are used to printing mostly black and white and rarely color, this 10 PPM speed should be adequate.

When it comes to copying, the 7232 has a rather large 75-sheet duplex document feeder. For those who don't know what that means, let me explain. Most people know what the document feeder is, it is the part at the top where you place paper and the copier sucks it in, scans it, and then copies it. A duplex, or double sided, unit means that it can take 75 double sided pages and copy them directly. This rivals their larger commercials printers, which can usually take around 50 to 100 sheets at a time, so this capacity is rather impressive.

The maximum paper size is 11x17, which is pretty good. However, there are cheaper models which can take 12x18 or larger. Also the paper capacity is 4,720 sheets, which should be more than enough for nearly any user.

Now that we have speeds and capacities out of the way, what about the features?

One I particularly liked was Print Around. Normally, when you have several printing jobs, they will run linearly. The problem with that is if a certain print/copy job requires colored toner, or a different paper size, the entire print queue will halt until you load said resource. With Print Around, the printer will automatically skip that job and move to the next one, so you can print everything out and then worry about changing or replacing said resource.

Speaking of jobs, the 7232 has a handy feature where it can handle an unlimited amount of jobs at once. Most other printers from competitors can only handle about five. For busy people who need to keep printing, or large businesses which keep sending documents to the printer, you will need more than this limit.

While I'm not entirely sure the 7232 is really worth the price tag, it does bring the innovation one has expected from Xerox to the table. If you do primarily black and white printing, this printer could suit your needs, but if you do a lot of color please move on to another higher speed model, as this would be a waste.