Lexmark E260dn

Lexmark E260dn

Lexmark makes a wide range of mono and colour printers, from individual up to departmental degree devices. A mono laser, the E260DN appropriates as a premium personal laser or for SOHO or small workgroup use. At simply under £200, maybe an extremely affordable machine, for all manner of business documents.

Lexmark E260dn Review

It is available in a two-tone palette of dark grey and off-white and rests quite squat and inconspicuous on the work desk. Its front side is tilted to become a straightforward control board, which uses individual LEDs instead of an LCD and integrates simply two switches, one for switching the printer on and offline and the other for quitting a print job. Unfortunately, there are no centres for walk-up print via a USB memory stick, which is a pity.

Near the bottom of the front panel, the main paper tray holds 250 sheets, and there is a single-sheet, multi-purpose feed behind a fold-down panel straight over that. A 550-sheet additional paper tray is available as a choice, bringing the maximum paper capacity up to 801 sheets.

As paper feeds to the printer’s top surface, a strange sprung cable restriction quits it from flying off the front of the machine. But, it needs to be said, web pages revealed hardly any sign of doing this, and the cable appears unappealing and repetitive.

At the rear of the printer are sockets for USB, Ethernet and traditional identical ports, so there should be a minor problem connecting this machine as a straight substitute for an older printer.

Drawdown the entire front panel, and you have easy access to the combined photoconductor drum and printer toner cartridge. This two-piece consumable is all you need to in shape and change, with the drum enduring a healthy and balanced 30,000 web pages and the printer toner a somewhat measly 3,500.

The software makes up a network management device and the drivers themselves, providing PCL 6 and Postscript Degree 3 emulations. The printer discussion offers watermarks, several web pages on each sheet, collation of output and control of duplex print in a simple and easy-to-learn layout.

Other Printer: Lexmark X422

Lexmark prices the E260DN at 33ppm, but we could not obtain two-thirds of this speed on average or prepare print settings from the machine. Standard print is what normal individuals typically use, as the prepared pattern is usually unclear enough for essential documents.

With this machine, however, prepare setting is 600dpi print, instead compared to 1200dpi. Since 600dpi is more significant than adequate for text, you might use prepare setting more often than other devices.

Sadly, we saw hardly any distinction in speed terms between normal and prepare settings on this printer. Our five-page text print took 19 secs in a typical environment and 17 secs to prepare. Enhancing the web page matter to 20 pages produced a print run in a standard set of precisely 1 min (20ppm), while the prepare setting equivalent took 55s, simply under 22ppm. It is hard to see where Lexmark could obtain several 33ppm unless printing a file with hardly any text.

Where the printer was far better was with duplex print. We usually anticipate seeing a duplex document take nearly two times the moment of the equivalent single-sided one. However, the machine accomplished a rate of 15ppm in a typical setting, three-quarters of the single-sided speed.

Print quality is over average, with spick-and-span, sharp text and greyscale video, which, generally, are well distinguished, colour from colour. However, there was a bit of graininess in some of the greys and in the skies of our test photo print, which also revealed over-dark darkness, with clear foreground information fading to black.

There is a solitary set of consumables for this machine, with the 3,500-page printer toner cartridge setting you back a relatively significant £86. However, this is partially made up for by a well-valued drum, at simply £32. Functioning through the maths gives a web page cost of 3.38p, consisting of 0.7p for paper. This is high for a £200 mono laser. However, we’ve evaluated a couple of devices with more significant web page costs.

Any printer manufacturer can manipulate the overall worth of their devices simply by increasing or reducing the costs of their consumables. So if you can find the printer toner at a reduced price compared to we could, you can bring the operating costs down straight. As it stands, however, this is quite a pricey laser to run.