Priced between the Brother HL-L6300DW and the Dell Smart Printer S5830dn, both top picks, the Xerox VersaLink B400/DN ($699) is a mid-to-high-volume single-function monochrome laser printer designed for small-to-medium-size offices and workgroups. Like its competitors, it has a high maximum monthly duty cycle; it prints well—and fast—and it's highly expandable. The B400/DN supports many connectivity and security features, but—as on the Dell S5830dn—many are available only as add-ons. In most ways, though, the B400/DN holds up to its Brother and Dell competitors, except that a slightly high cost per page (CPP) leaves it just shy of receiving our Editors' Choice nod.
Light and Mighty
Measuring 13.3 by 18.1 by 16.8 inches (HWD) and weighing 30 pounds, the B400/DN ($899.99 at Amazon) is a few inches smaller and 22 pounds lighter than the Dell S5830dn, and 27 pounds lighter and a few inches smaller than HP's LaserJet Enterprise M604dn ($1,349.99 at Amazon) , another capable high-volume single-function monochrome laser printer. The Brother HL-L6300DW, on the other hand, is a few inches smaller and 1-pound lighter than the B400/DN. In any case, none of these printers make good candidates for sitting on your average-size desktop, and that's especially true if you intend to take advantage of their expansion options.
Like others in its category, the B400/DN is a high-capacity workhorse. It comes out of the box capable of holding 700 sheets of paper, 550 sheets in the main drawer and 150 sheets in the multipurpose tray. You can expand that to 2,350 sheets by adding up to three 550-sheet drawers. The Brother HL-L6300DW supports 570 sheets by default and is upgradeable to 1,610 sheets; it also supports up to tabloid-size (11-by-17-inch) pages, whereas the Dell S5830dn's default is 50 sheets less than the Xerox model, but you can expand the Dell S5830dn to hold up to 2,050 sheets more than the Brother HL-6300DW. The HP M604dn comes out of the box holding up to 600 sheets, upgradeable to 3,600 sheets.
Xerox rates the B400/DN's monthly maximum duty cycle at 110,000 pages, with a recommended monthly print volume of 12,000 pages, which is the lowest among the models discussed here. The Brother HL-L6300DW's duty cycle is higher by 15,000 pages, the HP M604dn by 65,000 pages, and the Dell S5830dn by—wait for it—190,000 pages (with a whopping 50,000 page recommended monthly print volume). Without question, no matter which model you choose, however, each one is capable of churning through a whole lot of paper.
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The B400/DN's control panel consists of a 5-inch customizable color touch screen anchored by two buttons, Power and Home. Out of the box, the tablet-like icon-based display contains very few options, but between the Xerox ConnectKey Apps, Xerox App Gallery, and the ability to create custom macros, you can add icons to the display for apps that print from an individual user's favorite cloud sites, emails, USB thumb drives (from a USB port just below the control panel on the left-top side of the chassis), and just about every scenario you can think of. You can, for example, deploy apps that allow your individual users to scroll through and print documents located on a local server or on a remote cloud repository, such as, say, OneDrive, and much more.
In addition to the control panel, you can also monitor and manage your printer locally or over the internet from Xerox Embedded Web Server, Xerox CentreWare Web, Email Alerts, and Apple Bonjour. For higher compatibility across the board with desktop publishing and other applications, the B400/DN supports the following page-description languages (PDLs): HP's PCL 5e and PCL 6; Adobe Acrobat's PDF; Microsoft's XPS; TIFF; JPEG; HP-GL; and Adobe PostScript 3. Connectivity and Security Options Abound
The B400/DN supports just about every connectivity option available, starting with the basics, connecting to a single PC via USB, and up to Gigabit Ethernet. To get Wi-Fi and the popular peer-to-peer protocol, Wi-Fi Direct, however, you'll need to opt for Xerox's $49 Wireless Network Adaptor. Both the Dell S5830dn and the HP M604dn also require additional purchases to get wireless features, but the Brother HL-L6300DW comes out of the box with Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi Direct, and NFC built in.
With the Wi-Fi adaptor installed, Wi-Fi Direct Printing also becomes available. Other mobile connectivity features include: Apple AirPrint, Google Cloud Print, Xerox Print Service Plug-in for Android, Mopria Print Service Plug-in for Android, @PrintByXerox (for sending emails and attachments directly to the printer), Xerox Mobile Print Solution, and Xerox Mobile Print Cloud.
The B400/DN's many security features include: Firmware Verification (for secure firmware updates); controlling user access via Security Certificates (similar to Web-based SSL certs), in addition to Automatic Self-Signed Certificate Creation, Certificate Path Validation, and Certificate Revocation Settings to facilitate optional Smart Card Enablement; SSL encryption; Port Filtering, IP Address Filtering, and Domain Filtering (all for controlling incoming traffic); 256-bit Encryption; Secure Print for restricting access by user or groups of users via Network Authentication, Role Based Permissions, and Convenience Authentication.
No-Wait Printing
While testing the B400/DN, I noticed that every page, despite how complex the content and percentage of page coverage, printed one right after the other, with little-to-no lag time while the printer imaged each page. This can undoubtedly be attributed to the printer's healthy 2GB complement of RAM. I tested the B400/DN over Ethernet from our standard Core i5 PC running Windows 10 Professional.
Like Dell and Canon laser printers, Xerox typically configures its laser printers to output two-sided (duplex) pages by default in order to help save paper. In other words, to print one-sided pages, you must turn off the two-sided option in the printer driver. In any case, when we come across a machine configured like this, we record and report both the two-sided and one-sided results.
That said, the B400/DN churned out our simply formatted 12-page Microsoft Word monochrome text document at the rate of 31.9 images per minute (ipm), where both sides constitute an image. The Dell S5830d, which also defaults to duplex, printed the same two-sided pages in 35.3ipm. Both speeds are highly respectable for duplex printing. (The Brother HL-L6300DW does not auto-duplex by default, and the HP M604dn was tested prior to our current benchmarking regimen, making using its results here impractical.)
Xerox rates the B400/DN at 47 pages per minute (ppm) for simple monochrome pages, with the first page out at 8 seconds. It printed our 12-page Word document at 47.8ppm, almost 1ppm faster than its rating. Dell's more-expensive and higher-rated S5830dn printed the same pages at about 12ppm faster, and the Brother HL-L6300DW came in 3ppm above the Xerox printer.
When I included the results from printing the previous text document with those from printing our several color PDF, Excel, and PowerPoint documents containing charts, graphics, and photos, the B400/DN's score dropped to 18.8ppm, or by almost two-thirds of its Word document score. The Brother HL-L6300DN's and Dell S5830dn's scores were about 5ppm faster; the Brother HL-L6300DN dropped from its simplex (one-sided) score by about 50 percent and the Dell S5830dn, like the Xerox model, by about two-thirds, due primarily in all cases to the complexity of our color test documents.
The B400/DN converted our 4-by-6-inch color snapshots to grayscale and printed them at an average of 7 seconds, which is 1 second faster than the Brother HL-L6300DW and 19 seconds faster than the Dell S5830dn. What's much more important here, though, is how well it printed our test photos, not how fast—within reason, of course.
As Good As It Gets
The B400/DN's print quality is among the best I've seen recently for a monochrome laser printer. In my tests, text came out well-shaped and highly legible at all sizes and weights—down to the smallest size we test, 4 points. But then good-looking text is a given for laser printers. The B400/DN's business graphics looked good, too, with excellent detail and accurate conversions from color to grayscale. In a couple of our Excel charts, I did see some very minor banding in dark-gray backgrounds, but I do mean minor—the kind of flaws I had to search for and in no way detracting from the overall impact and attractiveness of the graphics themselves.
Photos, too, came out attractive and detailed, with no graininess or other flaws. The B400/DN did tend to darken our test images—some—but nowhere near enough to mar the overall quality of the images. I've no complaints about the B400/DN's print quality; compared with the other models discussed here, its output quality is somewhat superior, making it suitable for most business applications where black and grayscale output is appropriate.
Somewhat High Cost of Ownership
Printers in this class are designed to churn out thousands of pages each month; hence, their per-page cost of toner, or cost per page (CPP), is important. A half-a-penny difference in CPP can cost you literally thousands of dollars over the life of the printer, depending on how much you print. For every 10,000 pages you print, an additional half a cent will cost you $50. If you print 250,000 pages (remember that the B400/DN's monthly duty cycle is 110,000 pages), that comes out to $1,250—almost twice the list price of this printer.
With that in mind, using the combined advertised page yields and price for Xerox's largest toner cartridge and image drum for this printer, I calculated the CPP at 1.7 cents, which, frankly, is a bit high (though, if you shop around, you will probably find lower consumable prices—I used the prices on Xerox's site). That's 0.004-cent higher than the Brother HL-L6300DW, 0.001-cent higher than the HP M604dn, and 0.007-cent more than the Dell S5830dn.
Strong Contender
I found little to dislike about the Xerox VersaLink B400/DN. It's fast, it prints well, and it's loaded with features and expansion options. The problem is that it's positioned against some other very strong, feature-rich contenders that also churn out good-looking pages at a good clip, but with lower running costs. Granted, the B400/DN prints a little better than the others, but not quite enough (this is a monochrome printer, after all) to negate its higher running costs. If sheer volume at the lowest possible CPP is your priority, the Dell S5830dn is probably a better choice, and for the most complete solution—that is the most connectivity and other features without optional add-ons—you should check out the Brother HL-L6300DW. For the best-looking monochrome or grayscale output—if you don't mind paying a little more for it on a per-page basis—you should choose the B400/DN, a terrific solution as a midrange-to-high-volume monochrome single-function laser printer for small- to medium-size workgroups and offices.
The Xerox VersaLink B400/DN is a trim, high-volume single-function monochrome laser printer that prints well and quickly, and it's highly expandable, but lower running costs would make it a better value.
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