Product Reviews

Lexmark is better known for its budget inkjet printers, but the Optra E312L includes a few useful features too. There's a lot to be said for its upright design, with sheets feeding into and outputting at the top. Refilling the input tray is a two-second job. Lexmark goes one step further by adding a rare ingredient in the laser printer mix: quiet operation.

Ease of use

Apart from one glitch in the installation process (you're prompted to choose from a selection of fictitious port names - just choose '1' and you'll be fine), the Optra E312L is easy to use. We like the face-up output tray for printing on thicker paper or card, which is a simple door at the front. It opens flat, instead of being hidden at the back or spewing out pages onto your desk. The drivers are decent too, while still being simple to navigate. A thumbnail feature also lets you preview documents by squeezing up to 16 miniature pages onto an A4 sheet.

Print quality

The output from the Optra E312L is somewhere on the border between excellent

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and plain old 'good'. Text is fine, pictures are better, and all grey tones come out very consistently. We reckon that it's better to have a printer that makes a reasonable job of everything, rather than one that's superb at one job and terrible at another. The quality of output from the Kyocera was better, but the Optra still beats the rest for overall results from the widest range of programs.

Performance

Again, there are zippier printers around, but they're not faster by much. Our five-page Word document took 46 seconds, which is on the edge of acceptability, but that's still over six pages per minute. Better still, it handled mixtures of text and graphics well. Even complex pages came out in 25-35sec. Most significantly, while the Optra E312L took 25sec to complete our CorelDraw report document compared with the OkiPage 14ex's 13sec, you only have to look at the two printouts side by side to work out how the latter machine was saving time.

Overall

You might look at the print samples from our tests and say 'hmm'. You may be underwhelmed by the Optra's performance compared with the many speed demons we tried out. You may also be unsure why we're choosing to give our top award to a printer with just over half the input tray capacity of some of the others, and with a relatively expensive price per page. The answer is simple when you stop looking at individual tests and look at the whole. When you buy a printer for home use, it's not enough to be brilliant at one thing: it's got to be good at everything. That's what you get with the Optra E312L, and the price is just right too.