Lexmark X544dn review

Lexmark's X544 is a traditional small-office workgroup printer: it's beige, squat, heavy and designed to pump out an average of around 3,000 pages per month and a maximum of up to 55,000.

It has an excellent range of features, including an automatic duplexer, duplex ADF, 250-sheet paper tray and a native print resolution of 1,200x1,200dpi.

The X544dn has been around for a while, so doesn't come with Vista drivers. Fortunately, these can be downloaded from Lexmark's website. To install it over a network you should ensure that DHCP is enabled on the printer or that you've assigned it a fixed IP address.

Print speeds of 20.3ppm for mono text and 5.5ppm for our mixed-colour document are fast. Its automatic duplexer was surprisingly swift. We printed a full-quality duplex version of our 24-page mixed-colour document in five minutes and 19 seconds; that's 4.5ppm. The prints looked glossy and professional. Overall print quality was excellent, with solid black text and smooth reproduction of illustrations and photographs, with only slight graininess and a faint magenta tint on pale backgrounds.

The 600dpi scanner produces banded images with too much contrast. This can make for some atmospheric photo scans but is a disaster when it comes to archiving or photocopying illustrations. Unfortunately, you can't control the scanner across a network, although a few network presets are available once you've configured a target directory using the web interface. To use the scanner fully, you'll have to connect the MFP via USB.

The X544dn is expensive to run, particularly if you plan on doing a lot of colour printing. A single page of colour costs 10.9p. Add the cost of black toner, and the full mixed-colour page cost is 12.8p. If you need duplex scanning and an automatic duplexer, the X544dn is one of the cheapest colour lasers to have these features. If not, Epson's Aculaser CX21NF is a better printer that will save you a lot more than the difference in its purchase cost during its life.

Author: Kat Orphanides