The Xerox WorkCentre 3220 is an efficient mono laser multifunction. It has a 250-sheet paper tray and can output 150 sheets at a time, there’s also a beefier automatic document feeder that fits 50 sheets. Xerox offers a secondary 250-sheet paper tray too.

The unit has a 33.6Kbps fax as well as USB and Ethernet connectivity. On the front you’ll find a second USB port that allows you to print from and scan to flash drives. File format support is generous: the printer will recognise JPG, TIFF, PRN, PNG and PDF files, and can save scans in JPG, TIFF, PNG and PDF formats. The lack of Word or plain text file support is disappointing. The 3220 has 128MB of memory.

The 3220’s web interface is easy to use. It provides usage information as well as network and fax configuration settings. Security and network protocol options are scant making it tricky to install over a network.

Xerox claims print speeds of 28 pages per minute (ppm), though it surprisingly exceeded this during our tests. Print speeds remain the same regardless of the quality setting and the toner-saving mode, though we found the time to print the first page of a document varied slightly from 11 to 14 seconds.

Text is accurate at all font sizes. The 3220 printer’s blacks aren’t particularly rich, which can make monochrome graphics look dark grey. However, quality is good enough for graphs and charts.

The best thing about the 3220 is the cost of its consumables. High-yield toners produce 5,000 pages, but even if you get the 2,000-page toner, the running cost is still reasonable.

The 3220 lacks an integrated hard drive, but it provides an array of scan destination options, including sending to email addresses. It can store email addresses and users can also input a ‘from’ address and a destination address using the keypad. Unfortunately, the address book can be configured only from the web interface, and there’s no underscore key on the keypad.

The 3220 has an ID Card Copy function, which photocopies both sides of a business card before printing. While it picks up most information, it had issues reproducing text on coloured or dark backgrounds.