Lexmark C500n review

The C500n is Lexmark's new entry into the increasingly busy low-cost colour laser printer market.

The C500n includes 10/100Base-T Ethernet networking and USB as standard, but if you look through its technical specifications, you'll see a distinct lack of a certain word: PostScript. This device is aimed at the general business user rather than the designer, something that became clear as we examined this printer more closely.

Some of Lexmark's printers are very strongly styled, but the C500n isn't going to turn heads in terms of its appearance: it's a standard off-white, box-like printer, reasonably compact considering that it's a colour laser printer, but nothing really to shout about.

What's interesting is how Lexmark has presented this printer. It's billed as a 'high-speed mono printer that's also capable of producing colour print jobs'. The print engine speed specifications explain this positioning - the C500n is rated at a blazingly fast 31 pages per minute (ppm) for monochrome printing but a less-showy 8ppm for colour pages. This is pretty canny, as the average user, at least outside of designer-driven markets, will want colour output just some of the time. By concentrating the performance on the mono output, Lexmark has produced a colour laser that they say is both fast - OK, fast for black-and-white work - and affordable.

We never take manufacturers' speed claims at face value, so we put the C500n through our range of print tests to see how it handled itself. In speed terms, it performed acceptably, although it didn't actually reach its rated 31ppm figure: we achieved 10 text pages in 50 seconds. Bear in mind that our tests include the initial print collation time, as we start the clock when we click the Print button, but this wasn't quite the speed demon that we were expecting. Fortunately, the layout and image page tests showed that the printer wasn't exactly a laggard. A typical A4 DTP spread took a minute and 21 seconds for both pages and just over two minutes for the same job printed using the High Quality setting in its Print Character settings. Enough of its speed, though. How does the output itself stand up to examination?

We're pleased to say it looks pretty good. Colours are vibrant, blacks are crisp, and text and fine lines are cleanly drawn even at particularly small sizes. Curiously, we noticed a slight magenta cast in the midtones of greyscale images, but only when they were viewed under artificial light. In daylight, this problem wasn't evident. Colour work was rich and vibrant - possibly slightly too rich, in fact, but not to a serious degree. Any mainstream business would be very happy with the results, although designers might well find it just a little too 'better than real' with some output.

The printer driver does a good job with its default settings and also includes a decent range of options. You can fine-tune how it works with colour data, specifying whether you want plain blacks to be handled as just black, a 'KCMY' rich black, or one of a couple of other options.

We noticed a certain amount of noise from this printer as it warmed up and while it was busy; nothing outrageous, but this wasn't the quietest printer we've seen.

In the end, we had to admit that the Lexmark C500n does what it sets out to do very well - namely, to make colour laser printing affordable by almost any professional user. In addition, the quality of the results was very good, if just a little more saturated than was necessary. In practice, it turned out that it isn't as fast as it's rated, and the lack of a PostScript interpreter will certainly rule it out for most designers. However, Lexmark isn't really aiming at this segment of the market. This printer is good for those who don't need PostScript printing and would like a device that will serve as a busy little mono printer that can turn its hand to producing good-looking colour output when necessary. If this is you, take a closer look, but if you need the things it lacks, then it will never satisfy; keep looking.