Lexmark C543dn Color Laser Printer

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Lexmark's C543dn colour laser printer sports a completely new motor and is also offered at a temptingly lower price ($399 as of 12/16/08). A little place of work printing easy, everyday paperwork might locate it a great value--especially contemplating a duplexer comes standard. But if you will need to print complicated graphics, you are going to uncover faster-printing, better-looking benefits elsewhere.

Setting up the printer was mainly a easy process, with just one problem: the format from the setup information. With 24 languages jammed on each and every page, looking at even the top line of English can induce dizziness--let by yourself discovering one's native tongue somewhere inside the center.

The C543dn produced blended final results on our velocity and print quality assessments. It printed text at a decent clip of 19.8 pages per minute (ppm)--about common in comparison with other color lasers we have tested. The text alone seemed black and rather crisp. Shade graphics proved to be a tougher haul, as they arrived out really little by little: The C543dn's leading pace of two.8 ppm lagged much from the competition's by a wide margin. Color graphics and photographs seemed pretty natural on basic paper, but images appeared remarkably even worse on Lexmark's possess shiny laser paper: washed-out, grainy, and oddly tinged. The upshot: Follow basic paper, and get ready for any wait.

The boxy printer's configuration has one particular good bonus, regular automated duplexing. Every thing else is simple: a 250-sheet principal input tray using a manual-feed slot, plus a 100-sheet prime output place. Should you need to have a lot more paper capacity, a 550-sheet second drawer fees $199. That would seem dear, nevertheless it includes a 100-sheet multipurpose feeder. The control panel is minimum but usable, that has a two-line monochrome LCD and self-explanatory navigation buttons.

Maintaining the printer is fairly simple. The new motor functions keyed toner materials nestled guiding a door about the side of the printer--which helps make for less complicated accessibility than needing to open up the printer's guts. Even though it can be initially unclear whether or not you ought to pull or push on the cartridge launch levers, directions within the compartment door eased my confusion. Trickier, but rarer, duties incorporate replacing the toner reservoir and the print heads.

Low-cost lasers tend to have high-cost consumables. The C543dn provides some first reduction by bundling high-yield, returnable variations of its toner provides: a 2500-page black (K), and 2000-page cyan (C), magenta (M), and yellow (Y). With the time of our evaluation, changing these provides price $70 for black and $83 for every coloration. In contrast with other high-yield provides we've priced, the prices for each page of 2.eight cents for a plain-text web page and 15 cents for a four-color web page are within the dear aspect of acceptable. But they're nevertheless greater compared to standard-size, 1000-page materials: black fees $45 or 5 cents per page, while every single colour costs $59 or five.nine cents for each page. A four-color web page would value a whopping 22 cents.

The C543dn should stay down Lexmark's worse-than-average score for dependability in Personal computer World's Services and Reliability Survey. Let us hope it could conquer its previous, since it could generate a respectable, low-cost printer for little offices with gentle graphics needs.