Lexmark C500n review

At £235, Lexmark's C500n is one of the cheapest colour lasers you can buy with a network port. As it's networkable, this printer can easily be shared among a number of PCs, or you can just plug it into your computer's USB port if you prefer.

The C500n is big and heavy, so you'll need to install it on a sturdy surface. Before you can print, you'll need to drop in the supplied print drum and remove the tape seals from each of its four coloured toner cartridges.

We tested the printer over a simple network, such as you might have with a typical home router. Even so, the install program's search routine couldn't detect it and didn't give us the option to manually input the printer's network address. We had to use Windows XP's Add Printer Wizard to install the printer ourselves. This shouldn't be necessary and may be beyond those without technical experience.

The C500n tried to create our formal letter test as a full-colour print, leading to a very slow performance of 7.5ppm. When we repeated the job with the driver set to black and white printing, it reached an altogether more impressive 27ppm. Black text looked great, but our colour graphics document and test photographs were far too bright. The driver applies some optimisation to images as standard, so we tried to tweak these settings to get graphics looking better. Nothing worked, until we switched off all colour adjustments completely, at which point the printer produced acceptable looking colour prints.

The Lexmark comes with starter toners that each last for 1,000 pages, after which they can be replaced with high-yield supplies. Only heavy users are likely to replace the printer's drum, waste toner bottle and fuser unit, but toner costs alone work out at 2p per mono page and 9p for colour. That's more expensive than most of the competition.