Lexmark E120n review

To anyone who remembers the original $7000 Apple LaserWriter, the idea of a sub-£100 compact network mono laser quoted at producing 19 pages per minute sounds too good to be true.

And yet that's what we have here in Lexmark's latest entry-level mono laser printer, the E120n.

It's genuinely small - at less than 40cm wide and 36cm deep even with the input tray extended, colleagues regularly mistook it for a bulky inkjet. It's smart and reasonably well built, too. True, the buttons feel a little wobbly, and there's a little bit of travel with some of the plastic panels, but in general it's a very well put together little box. The paper feed at the front can only accept 150 sheets - a little restrictive, but not a huge problem for the low-volume users likely to buy this printer - but the cover flips up and stays raised in order to allow you to easily slide in more paper. A separate slot accepts up to five envelopes.

Toner is easy to change and fit: the entire front panel swings up to let you slide the broad, flat cartridge into place. The toner cartridge supplied with the printer is only a starter cartridge and is quoted at lasting 500 pages. This is frustrating, but it keeps the cost down, and 2000-page cartridges are available online through Lexmark's recycling programme for around £42. At this price, the per-page toner cost is just over 2p; this could be considered high in serious business use, but it's competitive for home users.

The photoconductor cartridge is fitted separately and has a projected life span of 25,000 pages.

Installing the E120n is easy: just follow the clear setup poster and add the printer in Printer Setup Utility. It can use Bonjour, and can be configured from a browser interface. The E120n has both USB 2 and Ethernet ports (the USB-only E120 is also available, but the prices we found online showed it to be at best only £2 cheaper) so it can be connected to a single Mac or to a network. You can also, of course, link the printer to a wireless base station or router to have cable-free access to it from AirPort-equipped computers.

If you don't have the drivers installed, Mac OS X will prompt you to use its generic PostScript driver, but then you don't get access to printer-specific settings such as defining print resolution.

Its print speed is impressive: from idle, it can take as long as 26 seconds before the first page drops into the output hopper from pressing Print, but if the printer's available, this drops to around 10 seconds. Our 10-page text document finished in less than 40 seconds, which is easily fast enough for home or small office use.

The print quality is excellent, too. Text is dense and black, and characters are very well formed. Six-point text begins to break up a little, but this is unlikely to be a concern in real-world usage. In any case, text printed at 6pt was still perfectly readable.

Images are as good as can be expected from a mono laser printer - there's a little banding evident, and the halftone screen, while comparatively fine, nevertheless gives results you wouldn't frame.

There was no noticeable difference in upping the print resolution to 1200dpi from the default 600dpi, or enabling PictureGrade, but there was no significant time penalty for doing so, either.

As it's a PostScript printer, EPS graphics and layouts from QuarkXPress and InDesign print smoothly, although as it's limited to A4 and the default 16MB of RAM, it's not suited to hardcore design use. That said, it amazed us by outputting our killer blends PDF, albeit after a good deal of processing.