The Xerox printer has arrived. Initial thoughts:

- Setup was entirely painless, both for PC and Mac. Not at all like the pain I've been through with HP printers. The printer speaks Bonjour, making discovery and such about as easy as can be.

- The printer is unquestionably a Samsung under the hood. Even the Windows print drivers had Samsung's name all over them, despite all the UI elements saying Xerox.

- The printer has a helpful web interface that can, among other things, let you set passwords for administrative tasks. Unfortunately, none of those passwords apply to the web interface. *sigh* At least the print dialog has a helpful link to launch you into the web interface. There's a firmware upload feature as well, but the printer isn't smart enough to go and get its own damn firmware upload, nor does it tell you were to go look on Xerox's web site (versus a number of other "help" pointers that it does have pointing at Xerox's web site).

- The rasterization happens on your computer, not on the printer. For short documents, you don't notice. For an 80 page document, rasterization takes a while, and (at least with the Mac) you have you wait until the rasterizer is done before the first page comes out. After that, though, you're zooming along at full speed. (Grumble: the rasterizer has two tasks running, one taking 93% of my Core Duo, the other taking 12%, leaving most of the performance of the second core idle. Apple needs to parallelize its rasterizer.)

- This thing is seriously power hungry. The lights dim when it comes on. My UPS (connected to a different wall outlet, but apparently on the same circuit) makes unhappy noises, apparently switching to battery and back. The printed pages, as they come out, are very hot -- hotter than any other laser printer I've ever used.

- The document I'm currently working on has a big "DRAFT" banner splashed across every page at 50% grey. When I first started printing it, the printer was going slow and I realized it was printing it in CMY color. I canceled the job (requiring me to hit the sole button on the printer; it was already gone from the local print queue) and tried again in black&white mode. Much faster, but also much darker. The CMY version of the grey closely resembled the on-screen PDF. The B&W version was much darker.

We'll have to see how it holds up, and whether its power saving mode does a semi-decent job. The only surprise is the power consumption. Otherwise, I'm very happy.