Lexmark X500n – Affordable Quality Printer

Pros

The Lexmark X500n generates high-quality prints at a brisk pace; is network ready; offers low print costs and comes with a built-in ADF.

Cons

The Lexmark X500n doesn’t have a junk fax blocker or safe fax receive mode; the walk-up scanning is not enabled in the printer; you can’t save fax groups and the grayscale scanning can definitely use some upgrading.

Introduction

The Lexmark X500n is yet another offering from Lexmark targeting the small work groups and offices. The primary difference between the comparatively highly priced Lexmark X502n and X500n is that the later doesn’t have fax, and hence is priced comparatively low at $499. The X500n is yet another tempting printer with great features and performance along with its decent feature set. The best thing that we liked about the printer is its speed and we must admit that its one of the best ever laser printer we’ve tested, and the great thing about it is that its great speed doesn’t comes at the expense of print quality. The printer also is one of the highly affordable laser printer, because of its reasonable print-refill costs.

Design

The Lexmark X500n in terms of design is a huge printer and measures 19 inches wide by 21 inches tall by 17.2 inches deep, and weighs a bulky 77 pounds. The printer can be moved all alone, but in order to protect the printer and your toe both, it’s not recommended (for kids it’s a strict “No”). Printer’s multifunction unit sits on top of the printer and comprises of an automatic document feeder, the control panel and a flatbed scanner. The flatbed scanner is sufficiently sized for scanning A4/letter-size originals, but if you want legal size scanning you can do it using the ADF. The ADF here can store around 35 pages.

The input tray for X500n is comparatively small and can store around 250 sheets, and further can be configured to hold the legal size papers. There also is an elective 530 page drawer available. But the main problem that we find here is the absence of manual feed slot, so eventually one or two prints can still go through the main drawer. The output tray is located below the control panel and can store around 250 sheets.

The control panel of the printer is rather basic and ordered. There are three buttons that let you switch in between your tasks. The standard buttons here includes decrease/increase, image quality, lighter/darker, start and cancel and menu navigation keys are all there for the printer. Lastly the control panel comprises of a backlit, two-line text LCD screen for reading the menus carefully.

The Lexmark X500n uses four toner cartridges for printing: magenta, cyan, black, and yellow. All the four cartridges are offered in regular and high capacity edition. All the four toners are reasonably priced, and hence printing with this printer is highly affordable.

System Configuration

Price: $499.00
Manufacturer: Lexmark
Printer Type: Laser Color Printer
Dimensions (W x D x H): 19 x 17.2 x 21 in
LCD Type: Monochrome
System weight: 77 lbs
Standard Memory: 128 MB

Operating System Support: Microsoft Windows XP, Microsoft Windows NT 4.0, Microsoft Windows 98, Microsoft Windows 2000 and Macintosh OS
Media slots: None
Included Hardware: Power cord, expandable tray lid and tray extension sheet
Included Software: Presto Page Manager

Performance

Just like the Lexmark X500n, the Lexmark X500n also performed exceedingly well in our performance test and gave us satisfactory scores for all the media types. The print speed for X500n was also almost identical to what we’ve seen in X502n and hence you can be assured of speedy prints with X500n. For black text it printed 19.71ppm, which clearly was 5ppm faster than the Xerox Phaser 6115MFP/N priced at $800. Its speed for black text was of 13.95 pages per minute, while for the color printing it was again dominant with the scores of 6.97 pages per minute for text and 6.82 pages per minute for color graphics.

So its clear that the Lexmark X500n dominated the speed tests like its elder brother Lexmark X502n, and just like the latter, its speed also doesn’t comes with the sacrifice of quality. The print quality for all the print media’s was almost perfect, and without any sort of disappointment. The only problems that we had here was that the colors here were a tad ruddy and the printer faced a tad problems while handling the print patterns like bar code.

Support

The Lexmark X500n gets a one year warranty from Lexmark, which comes with a toll-free telephonic support available on weekdays from 5 a.m. to 8 p.m. and from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. PT on Saturdays. There also is an online downloadable driver, a resource center and knowledge base to help you with any sort of new printing projects.

Word from the Experts

The Lexmark X500n is an affordable laser printer for small workgroups or offices.