Lexmark C530dn review

Like most colour laser printers, Lexmark's C530dn is large and heavy, but it's easier than most to unpack, provided you can understand the icon-based instructions.

At £307, the C530dn is almost twice as expensive as the cheapest colour lasers, but it has an impressive specification. Like the HP LaserJet P2015 reviewed opposite, Lexmark's printer supports PCL and PostScript printing. It also has a network port, so you can plug it into a router and use it from any networked computer.

These features make the C530dn good value, but it has one final trick up its sleeve. If you want to print on both sides of each sheet of paper, either to save paper or print a professional-looking booklet, it has a duplex unit that lets you do this automatically. With a fast single-sided speed rating of 22 black, or 21 colour pages per minute (ppm), you get a lot for your money.

Even if you're connecting the Lexmark C530dn over a network, the setup program makes the installation easy. The automatic option found the printer on our test network and configured it with the PostScript driver. We added the PCL driver manually, but our first PCL print ended with extra pages of junk text. We downloaded a newer driver, which fixed this problem.

The C530dn got fairly close to its rated speed in our text tests, peaking at 19.6ppm when printing copies of a formal letter. When printing on both sides of each sheet of paper, it managed an impressive 13.8ppm. As we'd expect, it was slower when printing complex colour graphics, but its 7.6ppm result is good at this price. Text was crisp and dark, and colours in graphics were faithful to the originals, particularly when using the PCL driver. Photos were also fairly good, though their colours were a bit flat.

This printer uses a separate toner and drum for each colour. Each drum should last for 20,000 pages, so most users will only need to worry about toner. Even so, this printer's running costs are slightly above average, so it just misses out on a Best Buy award.

Author: Simon Handby