Product Reviews

Aesthetically, the Lexmark is far from pleasing. The paper rest for the output tray looks awkward. However, it is rugged and handles a variety of media up to 163gsm in weight. Pages enter from an upright tray at the back and are pushed upwards to the front of the printer.

Ease of use

Installation isn't as simple as we'd like. Two driver discs were included - one of which wasn't the correct one for the printer. The second installed the drivers in a flash, but when we hooked up using USB and hit the Print button, we received an error message. To correct this, we had to manually tell the printer to use the USB port and not 'LPT1' - something that would stump first-time

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users.

Print quality

Text output was sharp, but not quite as defined as that of the HP and Epson. This lightness was far more noticeable with the photo and graphic tests. Lexmark seems to know about this issue, as the driver even offers a 'Dark' setting. Even this didn't make enough of a difference, though.

Performance

We were hoping that the lightness would at least mean that the Lexmark would use less toner and be cheaper to run. Alas, the toner cartridge costs £69 and lasts for 2,000 pages, making the E210's cost per page an expensive 3.25p. At least it put in a reasonable turn of speed, being the joint fastest to produce the Word document, with a time of 37 seconds. However, this is still slower than Lexmark's claimed rate of 12 pages per minute.

Overall

Despite having some of the most impressive specifications here, such as 4Mb of onboard memory and a 12-pages-per-minute print engine, the Lexmark goes to prove that it pays not to blindly trust what it says on the box. That said, it's a decent enough printer - and, with support for Linux, will appeal to the techies. It's also the cheapest unit on test. However, print quality and running costs are disappointing, making it firmly outclassed in this group.