Lexmark C522N review

Lexmark recently released several new colour laser printers, of which the C522n is the cheapest.

It's priced slightly above entry-level devices, which currently cost as little as £200, but its specifications are much higher. The C522n comes with a standard Ethernet port, and supports PCL6 and PostScript 3 print languages. What's more, it's the least expensive colour laser we've tested with a true 1,200dpi print resolution.

The C522n has a fairly small footprint, but it's a tall printer and weighs a considerable 26kg. Lexmark's setup program offers Suggested and Custom installations. The Custom option can add both PCL and PostScript drivers in one operation, but it didn't allow us to choose a port for the printer and ended up installing it on our notebook's non-existent parallel port.

We tried the Suggested setup, which found the printer on the network and automatically installed its PostScript driver. However, we had to change the port the PCL driver had set up earlier manually.

Unlike the Xerox Phaser 6120, reviewed on page 27, the C522n has a single-pass print engine. In theory, this means it can print mono or colour pages at its full engine speed of 19ppm. Our print tests showed that, as with many single-pass colour lasers, this isn't always the case.

In our mono print tests, the C522n peaked at 17.9ppm when using the PCL driver to print 50 copies of our test letter. This is a reasonable speed, but we've seen faster performances from cheaper colour lasers.

Colour pages are more complicated than mono and the C522n took time to process pages in our mixed-colour document, even though it has a reasonably powerful 312.5MHz processor and 128MB of memory. Using the PCL driver, it was able to deliver all 24 pages at 5.3ppm. This dropped to 4.9ppm during PostScript printing. It was slow to complete our photo tests using either driver.

The C522n isn't the fastest colour laser we've tested, but it produces high-quality prints. Its mono text in particular was very crisp. Colour prints have a pleasant satin finish, but they weren't a match for those of Epson's C1100.

As we went to press, an introductory Lexmark offer meant that some online stores were selling the C522n for as little as £194 including VAT. At its regular selling price of £391 it isn't such sensationally good value, but it's still a great choice.