Xerox VersaLink C415 review | IT Pro

Xerox’s VersaLink C415 is a fairly highly specified color laser multifunction peripheral (MFP), aimed at teams of 2-10 people. That puts it in contention for small offices and workgroups, but it doesn’t rule it out for home workers who expect to churn out a lot of printed material. While bigger than more entry-level devices, this isn’t unduly large or heavy, so it could fit into a variety of professional scenarios.

This MFP’s specifications are a bit of a mix. It has a fast printer, rated up to 40 pages per minute (ppm). Naturally, this is duplex capable, so you can print both sides of a page without needing to shuffle stacks of paper around. On top, there’s an impressive 100-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF), which also duplexes. Working together, printer and scanner can make double-sided copies of double-sided originals, which is a great way to save paper and produce professional-looking results.

Xerox also throws in a fax modem, plus there’s an inbuilt email feature that lets you send scanned documents. You can print from cloud services including Dropbox, OneDrive, and Google Drive. There’s a USB port for direct printing and scanning, too.

This is a robust printer, with a recommended volume of up to 10,000 pages per month, and a 125,000-page maximum duty cycle. It’s fitted with long-life imaging drums, rated for an impressive 125,000 pages. That said, it comes with only 2,000-page color toner cartridges, and 2,400 pages of black, but you can replace these with high-capacity alternatives. The largest color toners are rated at 7,000 pages each, while the black is rated for a healthy 10,500 prints. Many VersaLink C415 MFPs will be on managed contracts, but if you buy consumables yourself you can expect to pay around 1.4p (1.6p inc VAT) per black page. A color page will set you back around 9.0p, or 9.3p if you also factor in the cost of replacement drums. That’s more expensive than ideal for this class.

It’s worth mentioning a few missing features we’d expect to find as standard. The model we’re testing comes with wired networking only – wireless is an extra-cost option. More significantly, the VersaLink C415 has only a 250-sheet paper cassette – at this price, we’d expect to be able to load up a whole ream. And while there is a multipurpose feed, it’s only a single-sheet bypass slot tucked into the front of the tray.

Still, if you’ve the need and the budget, you can line up a few useful upgrades. You can add a 500-sheet tray, a 500 + 100-sheet tray, or both, to bring the total paper capacity up to 1,450 sheets. There’s a choice of stapler units, a 500GB disk upgrade, and optional AI features that include auto-redaction and summariser apps. Xerox provides a huge 17.8cm (7 inch) touchscreen, which ought to make controlling everything straightforward.

Xerox VersaLink C415 review: Setting up

As we mentioned, this multifunction isn’t quite as big or heavy as you might expect for its specifications. It’s probably still a two-person job to lift it into place, however. The VersaLink C415’s ADF overhangs the printer body at the back and left side, and it requires a little space reserved at the rear for when you open the scanner lid. This printer’s consumables are in a drawer on the right-hand side, so you’ll also need access there to install replacements.

Xerox ships this MFP with a liberal smattering of tape, spacers, and other shipping material: you’ll need to work your way around it removing them all. It’s a painless process apart from the two spacers in the front compartment, which are poised to ping out like elasticated nunchuks and smack into whoever’s pulling on the release tape. With all packaging removed, it’s a case of loading paper in the clearly labeled tray, connecting up an Ethernet cable, and switching on.

This printer takes a remarkably long time to boot. If it’s the first time, it’ll guide you through the region and language selection, then give you the option of continuing via Xerox Easy Assist, a mobile app designed to help accelerate the rollout and setup of Xerox printers. Alternatively, you can continue manually, or even clone an existing VersaLink C415 configuration via an inserted USB key.

Our US-sourced sample came with a driver CD in the box, but these days it’s just as quick to visit a manufacturer’s website and download the relevant software, in this case via Xerox Smart Start. This gives you a choice of the recommended PostScript driver or the slightly less fully featured PCL driver, but it wasn’t immediately obvious how to install both. It’s worth noting that TWAIN scan drivers aren’t installed by default – remember to select them in the Advanced installation if they’re likely to be needed.

As you’d expect, you can access this printer’s settings via its touchscreen, or the embedded web admin interface. Xerox continues to promote the security of its printers with digitally signed apps and system software, and support for features including multi-factor authentication. There’s a tendency toward locking things down by default – for example, you’ll need to enable remote start for scan jobs if you want users to have access from their own PCs.

Xerox VersaLink C415 review: Printing, scanning and copying

The Xerox VersaLink C415 is rated at 40ppm in black or color but, in our tests it fell some way short. This was mostly down to slightly slow spool times, which we typically include in our tests as they give a more realistic impression of true speed. The C415 delivered a first page of black text in a reasonable 16 seconds, before going on to hit 28.3ppm over our 25-page letter test. It took longer to spool our 50-page document test, leading to a comparatively slow 26.8ppm performance.

This printer’s color speed was disappointing. It could manage only 16.0ppm on our taxing, graphics-heavy 24-page job, about two-thirds the speed of some other printers in this class. It duplex-printed 10 sides of color graphics onto five pages in 70 seconds, which works out at a not especially impressive 8.6 images per minute. To be clear, these aren’t slow results, they’re just a bit more stately than we’d expect given this printer’s specifications.

The VersaLink C415 can print at 1,200 dots per inch (dpi) when the need arises, which halves its engine speed. We switched to this High-Resolution mode for our photograph tests, during which the C415 needed 39 seconds to print two 10×8″ photos on A4 paper, and 43 seconds to print six 6×4″ photos arranged on three sheets of A4 paper. One frustration to mention, common to all print jobs, is that sheets emerge backwards from the front of the printer into a slightly confined output tray – it can be tricky to reach in and extract them.

We experienced some issues with this MFP’s TWAIN driver, which proved very slow to respond on our test PC. As such, we conducted timed scan tests via the Xerox Workplace Android app, which offers a simplified workflow for day-to-day jobs. We were able to scan an A4 page in just seven seconds, at either 150dpi or 300dpi. A 600dpi scan of a 6×4″ photo was completed in a rapid 14 seconds.

Both the Android app and Xerox’s TWAIN interface offer something of a simplistic scanning experience, with limited opportunities for common tweaks like adjusting levels or rotating pages. We did like the simplicity of being able to share scans directly into Google Drive, however.

If the VersaLink C415’s scanner is rapid, its ADF is absolutely ferocious. During 10-page copy tests it urgently pulled through a stack of originals within just a few seconds, leaving the printer struggling to keep up. In this way the C415 could copy a stack of black or color originals in just 28 seconds. Switched to duplex color copying, this MFP duplicated a 10-page, 20-side job in 74 seconds. As always, this slower output is down to the overheads from duplex printing.

During our copy tests we began to uncover annoyances with this MFP’s touchscreen. It’s huge, but at times it was frustratingly slow to respond, particularly when scrolling down through a long list of options. If you leave it for too long the device enters sleep mode, forgetting which sub menu you were on and any changes you made. You have to press the power button to wake it back up, which takes a few seconds longer than you feel it ought to.

One positive thing to note is that the VersaLink C415 isn’t as loud as we’d expect for a printer in this class. It also transmits virtually no vibration, and no clunks or thunks into the desktop. As such, it could share a large desktop or table with users without becoming overly irritating.

You won’t be surprised to learn we have no complaints about this printer’s text quality. In fact, all of its black and white prints were excellent. Text was sharp and black, while graphics and even photos were richly detailed with plenty of contrast. Mono photocopies were perhaps half a stop too dark by default, but still way better than average for laser multifunctions.

Unfortunately, we can’t be anything like as positive about our color printing results. Graphics were generally quite good, with smooth color fills and progressions, and no obvious banding, blocking, or other laser artifacts. All the same, as they emerged we could see that their color accuracy wasn’t always perfect, with a slight tendency towards darker prints with a mild red bias.

Color photos, on the other hand, were poor. Initially using the PCL driver, skin tones were far too dark and bronzed, while color progressions were rendered with a degree of blocking, as though the printer didn’t have enough shades available for smooth transitions. Some features came up too dark, while one blue sky had aquamarine notes.

With limited tweaks available in the PCL driver, we switched to PostScript, which at its default settings offered a slight improvement. Switching to Vivid RGB in the driver’s Image Options tab was far worse, though, with lighter skin tones now looking horribly sunburnt. We got the best results by manually tweaking the contrast and colors, which produced a more natural-looking print, closer to the original.

This experience left us wondering if our test PC had an issue, although we had obtained similarly poor results from another computer. However, our color photocopies were bad enough to put our minds at ease. Working with darker source material, these generally had a reddy-brown bias, while lighter pages came out exaggeratedly bright and oversaturated. We used the advanced settings to reduce the saturation to its minimum but still weren’t entirely happy with the results.

Unfortunately, we weren’t enamored with our scan results, either. The C415 managed to ‘blow out’ the lightest shades in photos, losing subtle detail from bright parts of the original. At the same time it couldn’t preserve heavy shading, either: the darkest eight shades from our Q-60 input target were indistinguishable. In photographs, skin tones looked overly ruddy. Our 300dpi document scan was too dark, with the loss of detail from part of an illustration. At 150dpi, small text characters from the same original page began to look spidery and less legible.

Xerox VersaLink C415 review: Is it worth it?

Overall, this MFP simply isn’t good enough. While the VersaLink C415 has most of the features a small office or workgroup could want, and can be upgraded to add the others, it’s not an especially keenly priced machine. It’s frustrating then that it isn’t particularly cheap to run, that it couldn’t get closer to its rated speeds in our tests, and that we experienced underwhelming color print, scan and copy quality.

Xerox VersaLink C415 specifications