Lexmark C522n review

Unlike the Xerox 6120, Lexmark's C522n is a single-pass colour laser printer.

It has a separate drum and toner for each colour, so pages only pass through the print engine once to produce a full colour image. It's also the cheapest colour laser printer that we've seen, with a true resolution of 1200 dots per inch (dpi). And to top it all off, the C522n also has an Ethernet port - allowing all the PCs on your network to share it with the minimum of hassle.

Because it has a single-pass print engine, the Lexmark should be able to print both colour and mono pages at its top speed of 19 pages per minute (ppm). In our mono print tests, it peaked at 17.9ppm. Printers hardly ever reach their quoted maximum speeds, so getting this close is a very good result.

Colour pages are more complex than mono and it took time to process our mixed-colour document, even though the C522n has a reasonably powerful 312MHz processor and 128MB of memory. But our mixed-colour test printed at just 5.3ppm - nowhere near its quoted 19ppm. This isn't actually that bad - the Konica Minolta and Epson printers in our guides were both slower on our colour test. While we've seen printers that were much faster than this - up to 10ppm - these usually let themselves down by producing poor quality prints.

The C522n certainly didn't have a problem with the quality of its prints. Its mono text in particular was very crisp and bold. Colour prints were vibrant, accurate, detailed and had a pleasant satin finish. Each colour page costs 10.89p to print, but you can get this down to 7.6p per page if you use Lexmark's recycled 'return cartridges' - a very good per page cost, particularly for such good quality prints.

There's lots to like about the Lexmark C522n, it's quick, produces good-looking colour prints and you can easily share it with all the PCs on your network - a clear Best Buy.

Author: Peter Wood