Lexmark C935dn review

If you were buying a colour laser printer with all the trimmings for an office, what would you have on your wish list?

You'd want something fast, so there wasn't a lot of waiting around, something that could print duplex, so you could save paper and make a contribution to the environment, and possibly something that could print big; A3 would be good. Lexmark's top of the range C935dn does all these things, but is also very expandable, so you can build in extra facilities, as you need them.

An A3 printer is going to be big, but the C935dn is huge. None of the publicity shots prepare you for physical size of this machine, which easily takes up half of a standard office desk. It's nearly half a metre high and weighs over 90kg, so is a definite three-person lift. Make sure that you know where you want the printer to go, or invest in one of several Lexmark stands, with their heavy duty castors and extra paper trays.

As supplied, the printer comes with a 520-sheet multi-purpose paper tray, into which you can load A3, A4 or A5 sheets, as well as a 100-sheet multi-purpose tray, supporting a wider range of paper sizes. Although the machine can print A3 pages, it can't do full-bleed A3, aka A3+, which is a shame. Paper feeds to the printer's top surface which has a deep indentation to allow for long print runs.

The control panel is well laid out, with a backlit, four-line LCD display, simple controls and a number pad for entering access codes. This printer is intended for use in offices, where print costs may need to be allocated to specific people or groups and access coding is a good way to do this.

The other useful feature of the control panel is the USB port. This enables direct printing from USB memory drives - the printer can handle PDF, Jpeg and Tiff files - but not PictBridge cameras. At the back are sockets for USB 2 and Ethernet network connections, with the network going up to gigabit speeds.

The printer driver is the only dedicated software supplied, though it does have a Mac OS X 10.5 version on the Lexmark website and can be run from legacy Macs using Mac OS 9.x, too. There's also a useful coverage estimator, which counts the pixels on a page and estimates the percentage cover. If you know the cost of your consumables, you can then quickly work out how much a page will cost to print. This is a useful exercise, before printing 100 copies of that full-page A4 photo.

Standard consumables for the C935dn are rated at 38,000 pages for black and 24,000 for colour, assuming a 5% page coverage. However, Lexmark, along with most other printer manufacturers, sticks in 'starter' cartridges rated at 13,000 and 12,000 pages, respectively. Although the numbers sound large, you use a lot more toner printing a 50% cover A3 page, than a 5% A4 one. In fact, the costs work out at about 0.5p for a 5% black page and just over 3p for a 20% colour one, which are both good figures for a colour laser.

Print speeds are good, though perhaps not as speedy as we expected. Lexmark rates the C935dn at 45ppm for black and 40ppm for colour, though we couldn't get more than 25ppm out of the machine, printing in normal mode. Even allowing for measurements in draft mode, we think it unlikely you'd reach 40ppm. Duplex print, on the other hand, is surprisingly quick and Lexmark's quoted speed of 32 sides per minute is realistic - our 20-page test print took just over 35 seconds. Warm-up time from standby can be as much as 50 seconds, though.

The quality of prints from this laser printer is generally very good. Black text is sharp and precise, with very little sign of spatter or jaggies on curves and diagonals, thanks to its comparatively high resolution. This is claimed to be 2400dpi image quality and our photographic images bore this out.