Lexmark E232 review

Lexmark's E232 looks particularly sleek and futuristic in its black-and-silver body.

Most of its specifications and test results were what we had come to expect from these printers, but this natty little device had a couple of big surprises up its sleeve.

First, we were amazed by how much it cost. It didn't just come in at a little under our price limit: at less than £74, it was right down into the two-figure range!

Second, despite its extremely low price point, the E232 has PostScript 3 hardware inside. Better still, this PostScript print engine is for Mac users only - in an amusing turn of events, the Windows driver doesn't provide access to its PostScript hardware. If you want a PostScript laser printer, there really is no cheaper option anywhere.

The engine speed rating for this printer is an impressive 21 pages per minute for A4, which isn't the very fastest in our group, but still impressively quick. Anyone who needs to print pages in a hurry would be very happy with this throughput.

Like the Kyocera FS-920, this model eschews an LCD panel in favour of a line of status LEDs, but thanks to some judicious use of icons, it's a much simpler system to interpret.

The E232 connects via USB only (we don't count PC-only parallel ports), so this is a personal printer rather than something meant for network use.

So what were the downsides? Well, the quality of image reproduction wasn't what we'd hoped for. The overall tonal reproduction was too dark and the halftone screen ruling was coarse compared with many of its competitors. We did manage to improve this in the Print dialog's printer-specific options, but this would have to be selected each time rather than being a 'set and forget' option, which is a bit of a pain.

In addition, finer lines of small serif text did tend to be a little weaker than they should have been, and with very small text (three or four points, which is smaller than most users will ever need), the letterforms tended to break up at their thinner points.

Nevertheless, we kept coming back to two things: the Lexmark E232's price and its built-in PostScript interpreter. For less than £75, you get a reliable, fast, PostScript laser printer of your own. Astounding.