Type: Color laser printer
Functions: print only
Connectivity: Ethernet, Wi-Fi, USB
Max print speed: 33ppm
Max paper size: A4/letter
Print quality: 600dpi (4,800dpi enhanced)
Apple AirPrint: yes
Consumables included: 4x setup cartridges (1,000 color x 1,500 black)
Dimensions/Weight: 318 x 455 x 421 mm (WxDxH)/21kg
The Xerox C320 is an upper mid-price laser printer packing all the features demanded by a busy workgroup, while also appealing to the home worker with high print demands. It’s built for volume printing with a fairly fast print speed of 35ppm (pages per minute), a paper capacity of 250 sheets and a duty cycle of up to 65,000 pages per month.
It has premium features like a touchscreen interface, USB Host port and is supported by optional components including paper cassettes. There’s also a separate manual feed slot and the strong security I’ve come to expect from Xerox products.
It looks a little clunky to my eye, with the square toner compartment raised up on the right side, rather than inside the body of the printer. However, the more easily accessible toner cartridges promise bright colors and it turns out, I’m not disappointed.
Xerox C320: Design and build(Image credit: Xerox)Relocating the four toner cartridges adds some height, making the Xerox C320 larger than the more affordable Xerox C230 in all dimensions. The boxy form factor makes more sense in the multifunction version of this printer, the Xerox C325, where the square toner compartment forms one of the two pillars holding up the scanner section.
I found that the toner compartment opens almost too readily and the toner cartridges disengage at the lightest touch. The front access flap also flops open very easily so the whole thing feels flimsy. It’s the same with the lightweight cartridges. Xerox is using 30% recycled plastic here, which is great, so long as all these moving parts are stronger than they look. It comes with the same one-year warranty as the C230 series.
Xerox C320: Features & specifications (Image credit: Xerox)As a step-up model, the Xerox C320 has a higher spec and a few more features than the C230. The small difference in price of around US$27 buys you a 2.8-inch touchscreen with a more intuitive user interface and a USB Host port, so it’s with paying a little more in my view.
It’s significantly faster at 35ppm and has twice the internal memory (1GB). The paper handling is the same, with room for 250 sheets in the main tray and a single sheet in the front-loading manual feed slot. Both inputs are able to print on media up to 216gsm in simplex mode and 105gsm in duplex mode. That’s somewhat limiting, but this is a printer that doesn’t much like heavy paper.
This variant comes with the removable Wi-Fi module included and it has AirPrint and Chromebook compatibility. It’s using a 1 GHz Dual Core processor and unlike the cheaper C230, the C320 is supported by a range of accessories. These include a 100-sheet bypass tray and 550-sheet feeder, which means your printer can grow in step with your print demands.
The only thing missing is NFC, which is often useful in a shared office where staff are able to pull down their own print jobs using NFC enabled ID cards. You’ll find this feature on more expensive models like the Xerox VersaLink B600DN.
Xerox C320: Setup and operation(Image credit: Xerox)The responsive 2.8-inch touchscreen, an uncommon luxury on a print-only device, makes the Xerox C320 easy to operate and set up. Once you have loaded some paper in the main tray, plugged in and turned on, the display will prompt you to select a language and print out a test page.
Another prompt advises you to download the free Xerox Easy Assist app onto your iOS or Android device. This excellent app helps you make a wireless connection with the printer and get it onto your Wi-Fi network. It connects to a MacBook or Chromebook just as readily.
Xerox C320: Performance(Image credit: Xerox)The Xerox C320 printed quickly and efficiently throughout my tests, and with very little noise. Laser printers are usually louder than inkjets, but this one has a quiet mode that keeps the sound pressure level below 51dB.
However, I did experience two paper jams involving both of the inputs. The first was a case of too many sheets of plain paper feeding from the main tray at the same time and was easily cleared. The second was my fault when I accidentally duplex-printed 210gsm paper, which is too thick for this printer to turn. It was easy enough to open the front flap and remove the offending sheet, but harder to convince the printer the problem was solved. It took some time and multiple rebooting to resume printing.
This glitch could be a one-off event and the strong print performance of the Xerox C320, makes up it. Black text on plain A4 paper looks as clean and crisp as any premium laser printer, with characters legible down to the smallest point sizes. The quoted print speed of 33ppm for consecutive simplex A4 pages (35ppm for slightly smaller letter format pages) is accurate. That’s significantly faster than the Xerox C235, but slower than the HP LaserJet Pro 4002dn. In duplex mode, the pages are turned quickly so overall, this feels like a very efficient print rate.
The speed is the same for printing color documents, at which this printer is especially good, thanks to the bright toner in Xerox’s square cartridges. The mixed color pages in my multipage Word presentation look vibrant with no sign of banding or fading. What really surprised me, was how well the Xerox C320 prints color photographs. In general, lasers are worse than inkjets at photos because they can’t print on the same coated photo papers (laser photo paper is much like regular paper) and their resolution is usually limited to 600x600dpi.
The Xerox C320 has its true 600dpi resolution enhanced to 4,800dpi, which makes images look more detailed and natural. Combined with the boldness of the C/M/Y toner, the result is a pretty satisfying photo. I used specialist laser photo paper for this test, which gives a further subtle uplift in image quality from plain paper.
Xerox C320: Consumables (Image credit: Xerox)The square toner cartridges are a departure from the usual elongated shape and they feel suspiciously light. Sure enough, the bundled setup carts contain less toner than standard carts and will only yield 1,000 color pages and 1,500 black pages. Happily, high-capacity carts are available that will give you up to 5,500 color pages and 8,000 monochrome. A set of those will cost around US$670 (£500 ex VAT), which works out at a competitive CPP (cost per page) that would please any business with high print demands.
Xerox C320: Maintenance (Image credit: Xerox)The good news is that the maintenance routine for your Xerox C320 is a simple case of dusting the outside and apertures and replacing the imaging unit, which is very easy to access and remove, after 125,000 pages, or when prompted. The bad news is that a new imaging unit costs around US$338 (£480 ex VAT).
But because these imaging units last so long and need replacing so infrequently, the CPP is still low enough to make this printer as efficient, or more so, than many rival lasers and inkjets. You can print out a device report and quality check that will show supply levels at any time, but be warned that this will eat up nine sheets of paper.
Xerox C320: Final verdictImage 1 of 3(Image credit: Xerox)Image 2 of 3(Image credit: Xerox)Image 3 of 3(Image credit: Xerox)Despite my first impressions being lowered by the paper jam and insubstantial feel of the Xerox C320, I’m completely won over by its vivid print quality. It’s certainly well equipped with two paper inputs, Wi-Fi, USB Host port and helpful touchscreen interface. It prints quickly in duplex mode and text pages always emerge crisp and professional-looking.
Best of all though, are its vivid color prints. Photos in particular benefit from the bright toner and enhanced 4,800dpi print resolution. If you switch to the high-capacity cartridges for this printer, it’s quite economical to run too, making this a solid choice for any shared office with high print demands.
For more top-rated options, I've tested out the best home printers and the best small business printers.
Working with PDFs has become an important facet of working in the digital world, and what better way to do it than working on them online, from any web browser, and any machine?
There’s a plethora of services which do this, including Wondershare’s (mostly free) HiPDF. This review focuses on Wondershare's online service, but a desktop app, PDFElement, is available.
Having tested all the best PDF editors and the best free PDF editors, I wanted to see how Wondershare's offering stacked up against rivals - and just what "free" gets you.
Wondershare HiPDF: Pricing & plansSo yes, most of the tools HiPDF offer are free, although free does come with some restrictions. For instance, you have no access to OCR and batch processing. There are also usage limits for file size and page count, ‘Chat with PDF’ allows for a total of 50 questions, and the AI detector tool can detect 5,000 characters in total.
You can remove all those restrictions, by subscribing. HiPDF Advanced will cost you $70. However, there’s currently an amazing deal of $2 for the first year, which is a great incentive to get you to try it out.
On top of that, you also have a 7-day free trial to check out all the features, or just explore the free ones for as long as you please.
If you’re not a fan of working online through a web browser, know that Wondershare also offer a desktop version for Mac and Windows called PDFelement. This app does watermark its output, limits how many pages you can convert, and prevents you from saving an OCR conversion. All these and other restrictions are lifted when you grab a subscription, which ranges from $80 to $130.
There’s also a mobile version for iOS, although its features are locked behind a subscription, from $7 a week, to $30 for the year, or $70 for a perpetual licence.
You can check out HiPDF by clicking here.
Login to your Wondershare account (or create a free on for this purpose), and you’ll be graced with HiPDF’s home page. There’s a sidebar to the left, granting access to specific functions such as ‘Annotate’, ‘Edit’, ‘Convert’ and more.
However, should your needs be more specific, the main part of the page is dedicated to all the tools HiPDF offers, organised by categories. You’ll see ‘Most Popular’ first, followed by ‘AI Tools’. All the features you’d come to expect from a PDF service are present and correct: Edit, Convert to and from a PDF format, Organise your file, and Protect it.
Lastly, there are some image manipulation tools, to help you perform basic functions such as rotating an image, converting it to another format, cropping it, or compressing it.
To be frank, all of these Image Tools should be available with an Image library app that comes pre-installed on your computer, but if you like working in Wondershare, this presents you with another reason to stick with that company’s offerings.
Having a good interface is one thing, but a service lives or dies by how its tools are implemented. So I started exploring, looking at some on the popular functions, such as ‘Annotate’, where you have a series of tools to highlight or otherwise make notes on the PDF you’re working on. You’re able to add images and text boxes for instance, along with the odd shape, but I must confess to feel the lack of any kind of freehand option (but that’s likely because I like to doodle on my notes).
Perhaps the most useful tool is the one that allows you to edit the PDF’s existing content. Editing a PDF is always tricky - that format was never really meant to be edited - but it’s ideal when you spot a typo, or find the wrong date, or just need to succinctly clarify something. The PDF is broken down into boxes which you can move around and edit, and it works very well.
(Image credit: Wondershare // Future)Sadly, I got quite frustrated when trying to make other alterations to a file, like rearranging pages, and deleting others. Take Apple’s Preview for example: you can do both straight from its sidebar - it’s so easy, it’s effortless. Here however, you need to select the ‘Rearrange PDF Pages’ to reorder pages, save it, and then load up your document in the ‘Delete Pages’ tool to delete them… I couldn’t find a way to do both in the same action. HiPDF’s way felt needlessly time consuming.
The same could be said with the conversion tools. Don’t get me wrong, they’re a great addition - when they work (if your PDF has a complex layout the conversion could end up being incredibly messy) - but why do I have to choose ahead of time which format I wish my file to be converted into? Why can’t I select the convert tool, and once I’ve opened a file, choose which format to use? That way, I could save it in multiple formats should I so wish, rather than select the ‘convert to Word’ tool, open the file, convert it, then go to the ‘convert to PPT’ tool, open the same file, convert it, etc? It seems needlessly time consuming - again.
And speaking of time consuming, the free version sets a limit on how many files you can work on each day. To be fair, this might affect me more as a reviewer who needs to explore as many facets of the service as possible, than a user who just wants to fix the odd PDF or two, but still, when other similar services don’t cripple their wares like that, it does make you wonder if HiPDF is the right tool for one’s needs.
It wouldn’t be a modern service if it didn’t come with AI, and despite my disappointment at some pretty strict restrictions when using HiPDF, they do offer you a few credits to kick their AI’s tires and check what it’s made of.
‘Chat with PDF’ gets AI to analyse a document for you, bringing you a quick summary of its content, and allowing you to ask it questions based on said content, which it will answer. I guess it’s great for those who don’t want to read a document themselves.
‘AI Detector’ will try and analyse your document to see if it was created by an AI - like a robot snitching on other robots (I was quite pleased the articles I wrote myself were deemed to have a probability of 97% to be human generated!)
Contrary to what I thought, ‘AI Read’ doesn’t read a document back to you; it just summarises it and there’s even a text field for you to ask it some questions, which feels totally redundant as that’s exactly what ‘Chat with PDF’ does.
(Image credit: Wondershare // Future)An AI tool I couldn’t get to work was ‘AI Translator’. Sounds useful, right (as long as you don’t know Google Translate exists), but I couldn’t find any icons, buttons or menus that would allow me to choose the language I’d like HiPDF to translate my article into.
And then there’s ‘AI Proofreader’ which analyses a document, once you’ve told what language it’s in, and then it proceeds to copy the text from it… and that’s it? Now it’s possible the articles I used to test this out were so perfect they didn’t need any fixes (possible, but let’s be frank, somewhat unlikely), but I got zero information out of the process.
Aside from being able to export the text, the AI didn’t tell me anything about it, nor gave me any hint as to what this tool’s purpose genuinely is.
Buy it if...
You’re on the lookout for a simple PDF service which mostly works fine, you don’t need to use it too often, and don’t really care about its clunky AI.
Don't buy it if...
You don’t like the extreme restrictions when it comes to the free account, and don’t want to get yet another subscription, no matter how cheap the first year happens to be, just to edit some PDFs.
For more productivity tools, we tested the best free PDF readers and the best PDF readers on Android.
Last year, I reviewed Xodo, an excellent online PDF editor well worth checking out (you can read my review here). But did you know Xodo also offer a desktop version of their service for Macs, Windows and Linux?
After testing some of the best PDF editors and best free PDF editors, I was keen to see how the downloadable Xodo PDF Studio desktop version compares to its online counterpart, as well as other big players in the PDF space like Acrobat.
Xodo PDF Studio: Pricing & plansWhether you opt for Xodo’s online service or its desktop version, it’ll cost you the same if you opt for a yearly contract (which would be the equivalent of around $10 a month per license). Choose to pay on a month by month basis, and the value changes to $13 online, and $20 for the desktop version.
If you’re sick to the back teeth of subscriptions, Xodo have you covered, offering you a perpetual licence for the Desktop app, for $240 per seat.
Curious about the service but don’t want to financially commit just yet? Then grab their 3-day free trial. All its features are unlocked and hopefully three days should give you enough time to check out the software, and decide if it’s right for you or not.
You can check it out over on the official Xodo website by clicking here.
Launch Xodo and you’ll find the interface to be… fine. It doesn’t scream ‘modern design’, nor does it bask in unwanted 90s nostalgia. It’s just… ok. All the tools and icons you need are located at the top of the window, in a basic black and blue minimalist style. It’s fine, really. It’s just not… that appealing.
What is a nice touch however, is that the first time you launch the app, it will automatically open a PDF which explains what its interface does. and where to find what you need. Full marks for that.
You’ll find the tools are accessible in multiple ways. For instance, by default, those you see are from the ‘Home’ menu, and pretty much all the ones you need are there, from selecting text, to searching inside the document, adding a comment, highlighting a section, even editing the PDF’s content, and adding shapes, among others.
However, above these large icons is a thin menu bar, which lets you focus on specific categories of tools, even though you can also access most of them from ‘Home’ already. For instance, if you want to add a comment, in ‘Home’, click on the ‘Comment’ icon to reveal a drop down list bearing multiple options. But if you were to click on ‘Comment’ in the thin menu bar instead, those icons are replaced with a new set, showing you all those that were in that drop down list we just saw.
It’s all the same tools, just available in different ways. It can get a tad confusing, especially as the selected menu in that thin menu bar only has a subtle blue line underneath it, which can be easy to miss, which can make you wonder why the icon you’re after isn’t displayed… until you realise you’re in the wrong menu.
Mac users have a third option, through the system’s own menu bar, from which you can also select all the tools you need. Don’t get me wrong: options are good, and being able to access the same tool in different ways is a good design decision… I just wish the app’s selected menu was at least more prominently highlighted to reduce possible confusion.
To start using the tools, take a quick trip to the ‘File’ menu to open an existing document, either from your computer, or directly through one of various online storage services, such as OneDrive, DropBox, GoogleDrive, or Xodo’s very own XodoDrive. This is also the place where you can create a new document, either from scratch, or by importing various files, like images, a scanned file, collate multiple files into one, or convert docs from MS Office or AutoCAD.
Once you’ve got a document loaded up, you’re free to annotate and alter it to your heart’s content. It’s actually pretty easy to make notes, highlight, draw on the PDF itself, add shapes to mask areas (although redaction is a much better tool for that should the info be sensitive and not to be divulged - Xodo supports this feature too).
Reordering pages and deleting some is a cinch and done through the left sidebar, but perhaps the most exciting option is the ability to edit the very existing content of a PDF.
Some tools, like Extract, do allow versatility, letting you reorder and rotate pages (Image credit: Xodo // Future)This is not a feature that is available from all PDF applications - in fact, it’s usually seen as one of the most advanced features, and not every app that includes it does a good job of it, making editing more of a chore than it should be.
I’m pleased to report that the Xodo Desktop App excels at editing existing content. When that tool is activated, you’ll see a faint blue rectangle surrounding the various text and image boxes in your document. Click on one to select it and move it around, or once selected, click inside the text box to alter its existing content, using the exact same font and size as the original. Now it doesn’t work like a word processor or a desktop publishing application: you can’t link text boxes together and make your copy flow from one to the next. This is for minor edits, and changes that don’t require having to go back to the original document and make alterations from there instead. But with those limitations in mind, for a PDF editing tool, it works fantastically well.
(Image credit: Xodo // Future)The only tool I thought was superfluous was the Snapshot, which as its name suggests, allows you to take a screenshot of a selected part of the PDF you’re working on. Sure, you have the option of selecting its format (PNG, JPEG, TIFF or GIF), or send it straight to a printer - which is novel - but every computer has screenshotting capabilities built-in, so why bother using that one? But that’s a minor quibble.
All in all, despite its icon design or tool organisation which could do with a little love, the Xodo Desktop App is an excellent PDF editor which makes it easy to perform even tricky tasks.
Buy it if...
You’re looking for a desktop PDF editor (ideal for increased security over an online service), with a boatload of tools that are easy to use, and includes well implemented, powerful advanced features.
Don't buy it if...
You only need to make a few changes to a PDF, like delete a page, or reorder another, but all the other tools Xodo has is just overkill for your needs.
For more productivity tools, we tested the best free PDF readers, the best PDF reader for Mac, and the best PDF readers on Android.
Israel and Hamas say they are committed to the ceasefire after clashes over the weekend. And, lawmakers not feeling the pressures of the government shutdown.
(Image credit: Eyad Baba)