Lexmark C532dn Colour Laser Printer Review

While Lexmark may be known for cheap and cheerful inkjets in the domestic market, it has a very different reputation in the business arena. The company’s range of black-and-white and color laser printers for workgroups and SMBs is highly regarded. The C532dn is designed for use in the network and has a built-in duplexer, which saves paper.

There seems to be a trend in the color laser market to build printers with smaller footprints but more height. Lexmark certainly took this into account and produced a monolithic machine with the inline printing mechanism housed vertically within it. It’s even higher when you add the optional second 550-sheet paper tray.

A standard 250-sheet paper tray slides in the bottom in the traditional way, but the front of the tray folds down to form a single-sheet multipurpose feeder, which is rather unusual. The paper exits into a large tray that hangs out at the top rear of the machine. This is reflected in the paper feed tray below, which also protrudes from the rear.

The printer’s control panel contains a four-line, 16-character LCD display that could use some lighting and a less reflective front panel. There’s also a five button control ring and three more buttons on the left for entering the menu, exiting a menu option and stopping a current print job. USB 2.0 and Ethernet ports are located in a notch on the left side of the printer, making them more accessible but a bit unsightly.

The C532dn is not an easy printer to set up. It is crammed with tape, pieces of packaging and spacer sheets, all of which must be removed before it will function satisfactorily. It even has power-on diagnostics that will verify that you’ve removed everything.

The printer uses an in-line laser mechanism with separate toner and photoconductor cartridges for each color – you slide each toner cartridge into the machine’s body and insert a photoconductor drum into a corresponding assembly inside the swing-down front cover. All consumables are pre-installed in a new machine, which is why so many covers and spacers have to be removed.

The automatic software setup only installs the PostScript 3 emulation, not that of PCL 6. This seems like an odd choice as PCL is almost always faster than PostScript and there is little discernible difference in print quality between the two.

Lexmark specifies print speeds of 22 pages per minute and 21 pages per minute for black and white and color printing. Our five-page text print was completed in 24 seconds, giving a real non-draft mode black print speed of 12.5 pages per minute, and the color text and graphics job, also five pages, took 27 seconds, which is 11.1 pages per minute results. The ratio is about right, although as usual we see about half of the claimed numbers.

The print quality of this machine is very high. Text output is sharp and clear with very little spatter and good clean diagonals and curves. Color graphics are also rendered well with bright, solid colors and good text overlay, showing no text splatter or misalignment with the underlying colors.

The photo reproduction, which is usually not a strength of laser printers, is better than usual. Of the two print modes available, Normal and Best Quality, there are some slight improvements in the color palette when using the best print quality. Neither image looks particularly natural and there is slight banding in the sky portion of the image, but the overall results were impressive for a color laser.

When printing in duplex mode, the C532dn prints the first side of two sheets on both sides of the paper at the same time and pulls each one out of the output tray to print on the second side. The device is fast and efficient at duplex printing, but it’s quite noisy with all types of printing. Lexmark claims a noise level of 53 dBA, but we’ve measured it consistently at around 60 dBA, an intrusive noise level.

This printer contains two sets of consumables: photoconductor drums and toner cartridges. Black toner is only available in 4,000-sheet capacities, but the three color cartridges can be bought in 3,000-sheet and 5,000-sheet versions. You can also purchase the 20,000-sheet photoconductor drums individually or in packs of four.

Using the consistently cheapest options, we get a 5 percent black text page cost of 2.02 pence and a 20 percent color page cost of 7.92 pence. Text-page costs are slightly higher than some of the printer’s main competitors, but this is offset by color costs, which are on the lower end of the scale.

“‘Verdict”‘

This is a good color workhorse for a small office or workgroup within a larger organization. Black and color output is well above average and while a little cumbersome to maintain, it’s quick and relatively inexpensive to run.

points in detail

• print speed 8

• functions 7

• value 8

• print quality 9

characteristics

To press