Lexmark E460dw – Excessively Priced Slow Printer

Pros

Lexmark E460dw has an Auto-duplexer and an in-built wireless print server.

Cons

The Lexmark E460dw offers conflicting print speeds, the poor quality is awful, and all these flaws come in an atrocious but expensive machine.

Introduction

The monochromous laser printer Lexmark E460dw is developed for the midsize businesses, for which it’s all about speed and wants a printer that can deliver great print speeds and can print documents as speedily as possible. This is a single function laser rpinter, and hence can’t copy, scan or fax, but it does offer wireless printing through an integral print server.

But in our view, the price tag of $700 is way too much for E460dw, especially considering the fact that the printer doesn’t have anything except for excruciatingly dull exteriors and poor print quality. Though, the output quality is considerable for plain text, but for anything else it’s way beyond acceptable and it even didn’t come closer to its advertised printing speed in actual printing. We won’t recommend this laser printer to any of our readers, instead we will say you go for the Samsung ML-2851ND, which is priced half the price of Lexmark E460dw and offers a lot better performance in terms of quality and speed then this one.

Design

The one word that personifies the overall design of Lexmark E460DW is “Atrocious”, and we don’t have any problems in mentioning it right here. Though, the Samsung ML-2851ND also didn’t have a great design, but yes if you compare it to Lexmark E460DW’s design it will look like Merlyn Monroe. It’s not only because it’s of its 2 inch bigger size measuring 10 by 16 by 15 inches (H x W x D), but also because of its glaringly cookie-cutter grey and white case. We do appreciate Lexmark’s effort to conciliate a lot of office colors by painting the laser printer with a muted palette, but the fact still remains the same that the Lexmark E460DW is so boring looking that even if its placed right in front of you, there are chances that you wont notice it.

The overall shape for the printer is cubical with the printer output tray located right on top of the box and the frontage of the printer hosting a widespread array of menu buttons and 3 inch grayscale LCD, which is flushed against the frontage. The backlit display of the printer enhances the user experience of the printer and displays the operational messaging, printer settings and status updates. The laser rinter settings can also be changed directly with the four-way directional pad.

The rear end of the printer hosts an incorporated 802.11b/g/n wireless print server and antenna for detecting and catching the local Wi-Fi networks. There also is an Ethernet port located at the back of the Network for connecting to a wired network. You can set your preferred network connection and can select between the wired, wireless and local settings from the initial setting option. All the three connection options require you to connect the printer first to a system with a USB 2.0 cord. Setting up the connection is an easy task and we were able to connect to our lab’s wireless connection within five minutes following the instructions from the driver.

System Configuration

Manufacturer: Lexmark
Weight: 30.9 lbs
Dimensions (W x D x H): 16 x 14.6 x 10.2 in
Printer Type: Workgroup printer – Laser – Monochrome

OS Required: HP-UX 11.23, HP-UX 11.11, IBM AIX 5.3 , IBM AIX 5.2, Ubuntu 8.04, IBM AIX 6.1, openSUSE 10.3, openSUSE 10.2, Linux Linpus 9.2, Linspire 6.0.x,   SunSoft Solaris 8, Linux Linpus 9.3, Novell NetWare 5.x, SunSoft Solaris 9, Red Flag Linux 4.0, Novell NetWare 6.x, SunSoft Solaris 10, Red Flag Linux 5.0,   Microsoft Windows XP ,   Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 ,   Apple MacOS X / MacOS 9 ,   Microsoft Windows 2000 ,   Microsoft Windows Vista ,   IBM OS/400 3.1 or later , Ubuntu 7.10 Desktop Edition, Ubuntu 7.10 Server Edition, Microsoft Windows Server 2008, Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS 3,   Novell Open Enterprise Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS 5, Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS 4, Citrix Presentation Server 4.5 ,   Citrix Presentation Server 4.0 ,   SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 ,   SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 ,   SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 ,   SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 ,   Citrix MetaFrame Presentation Server 3.0 ,   Microsoft Windows XP 64-bit Edition ,   Microsoft Windows Vista (64-bit versions) ,   Microsoft Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition ,   Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Terminal Server

Microsoft Certifications: Compatible with Windows 7
Media Type: Labels,   Cards,   Envelopes,   Plain paper,    Transparencies

Processor: 466 MHz
Built-in Devices: Status LCD
Interface: 802.11b, USB, 802.11n (draft), 802.11g, Ethernet 10/100Base-TX
Power Device: Power supply – Internal
Software Included: OKI PrintSuperVision, Driver, OkiLAN Embedded Web Server

Performance

The Lexmark E460dw comes with rated print speed of 38 black text sheets per minute, but in actual it fell way short of that. In our test the printer printed an average of 17.61 pages of text per minute, so regardless of Lexmark’s the actual performance for E460dw is pretty poor.

In fact the older Lexmark E350d and Samsung ML-2851ND offered a much better performance then E460dw and printed 24.33 and 20.67 respectively. The same was the case for the other printing tests for Lexmark E460dw. After seeing a disastrous print speed performance, we were hoping to get great print quality at least, but here also the case was same and in all three print quality tests (presentation, graphics, and simple text) the print quality let us down big time.

Support

Lexmark backs its E Series printers with its one-year exchange warrantee; you can access the technical support through telephone from Lexmark Technical Support Center. The online support also is available at Lexmark’s website, and if an issue doesn’t get resolved from telephonic support you can always check the website. Lexmark also sends its technical guys to troubleshoot any technical issue that wasn’t solved through telephone or online support. Lastly, there is a all-inclusive support center which offers drivers and downloads, FAQs, How-Tos and warranty upgrades.

Word from the Experts

Lexmark E460dw is an overly priced printer, which neither offers great print speed, nor great print quality. Even the small business shouldn’t consider this printer as there actually isn’t much that this printer can do for you.