Excellent Small Printer for SoHo

This is the first Lexmark laser printer I've owned, after having had two Lexmark inkjets. I'm really surprised how well this printer is made compared to the inkjets. This is the perfect printer for a small office or home office, or even homes with students that print larger volumes.

How I use it
Before I dig into the review, let me explain how I use it so that there's context for my review. My wife and I have just built a new home wherein we employed a mix of wireless and wired networking. I have installed the printer on my wired network in our basement office. This printer is not attached directly to any computer. Our environment is mixed- that is, we run a mix of Windows XP Professional and Macintosh OS X machines. As you'll see below, this is one of the very few inexpensive printers that I've found that flawlessly supports Mac and Win on a common network.

First Impressions
Upon opening the box, the first impression one will get is a little deflating- it just isn't an attractive printer. The grays are not very appealing, but I didn't choose the printer for how it looks; I chose it for how it performs. Inside the box are all of the essentials: CD, Power Cord, a few sheets of paper (mostly with "legal-eze"), and a paper tray cover (more on that in "Setup," below). Removing the printer from the box is rather simple- the printer is not very heavy.

Setup
To set-up the printer, one has to remove some tape, open the cover, remove the cartridge, remove the cartridge's padding, and replace the cartridge. The cartridge is a two-piece affair, and the two pieces must be detached to remove the padding (more on this below). After attaching the power cord (and in our case, the network cable), one can turn it on and it's ready to print in only a few seconds. The printer is very fast to come to ready.

Optionally, there is a small, rectangular paper cover that you can attach to the back of the printer. If you print on legal paper, you'll want to attach this cover; if you don't print on legal paper, you may want to attach this cover anyway. When you use legal paper, you have to extend the back of the paper tray to a length such that the tray sticks out the back of the printer. This paper cover is intended to cover the paper tray and keep dust and other items (paper clips, pens, pencils!) from falling into the paper tray. Since we rarely print on legal-size paper (and if we do, we'll use the single-sheet manual feed slot), we considered not installing this cover so that we could place the printer closer to the wall. But, as the power cord and network cable prevent us from putting the printer up against the wall, this cover fits into the space between the printer and the wall and doesn't require any additional space. Besides, in a shared network environment, you never know who's going to put what paper in that tray!

Driver Installation for Network Printer
If you don't have this printer installed on a network, our driver installation will be a little different than yours, but will likely be just as simple.

One needs to do nothing to the printer to use it over the network- once it's powered up and connected, just insert the CD in the computer's drive and follow the instructions. Choosing "Network Attached" for the printer location allows the driver set to search for the printer on your network using Lexmark's printer protocol. Nothing could be easier. Assuming that the printer is on the same network segment as your computer, the driver will find the printer and install it in moments. This is true for both Mac and Windows. The same driver disc, both OSs, no problems! If you are a more nuts-and-bolts network person as I am, you may want to tweak a little...but you won't need to!

The Cartridge
The cartridge is a two-piece affair. Removing both pieces requires a single pulling motion, as they are locked together. To remove only the toner portion, one must depress a little button to unlock the toner part from the other. This can be done with one hand (if you're right-handed).

So far, toner use seems to be reasonable. We have generated quite a lot of print, and the cartridge that came with the unit still has quite a lot toner left. One can determine the amount of toner left using either the status program that is installed with the driver, or by printing the menu pages.

Printing and Printer Features
Once installed, printing is very easy. The installed duplexer is wonderful. OK, so we are a little "green" at our house (we recycle everything possible). Having a duplexer was very important to us, as we like to use as little paper as possible; having a duplexer in our new printer was a requirement for us.

The front status lights are a little challenging at first, but once you get used to them, they are easy to figure out. I do wish that Lexmark had added some text to the front panel so that I didn't have to consult a reference sheet to learn what the status lights mean, but it didn't take long to learn what they mean, and because the printer has performed flawlessly, I haven't had much need to use them.

The printer features a single, manual-feed slot on the front. This is perfect for printing envelopes, postcards, and invitations, or for printing on non-standard media. To print on an envelope, for example, simply adjust the guides by pushing them inward to the size of your envelope (they are geared to move together) and insert the envelope. When the printer senses the paper, it will feed the envelope in slightly and hold it there until it receives your print job. Be warned: if you use the printer on a network, tell the others in your house- as long as there is something in the manual slot, the next job received by the printer will be printed on the item in the manual feed slot- someone could accidentally print on your envelope. If you're printing a lot of special items (for example, invitations), you'll want to place them in the drawer, but for a small number of special prints, the manual feed slot is very handy.

Printer Performance
When first using the printer, we were amazed by the speed. One of our PCs is about 25' across the basement from the printer. The printer is so fast to start printing and so fast at completing the print job, that a 4 page duplex document is almost completed before I can walk across the room to get it. Very impressive!

Print Quality is very good. For a printer that costs slightly over $225, the overall print quality is very good. There are some little bits of visible bars or lines in certain graphics, but as we don't print graphics on this printer (we have another color inkjet for this), this is not really a concern for us. For text, this printer is very good, with clear, crisp text even on font sizes as small as 6pt (Arial).

Overall Impression
Overall, we are very impressed with this printer, especially after having owned Lexmark inkjets. But to be clear- we are very impressed with this printer on its own merits, not just because of how it compares with Lexmark's inkjets.