Product Reviews

In terms of technology, the colour laser printer market has been very quiet over the past year. QMS failed to make a good impression with its budget-priced Magicolour 2EX (reviewed issue 41, p163) and you have to go back to July 1997 to see Canon's CLBP 360 (reviewed issue 33, p154). However, with the introduction of the Optra Color 1200 range, Lexmark has sounded a clear wake-up call to the industry. Until now, colour print speeds have been restricted to a pedestrian 3ppm but the new 1200 range claims an incredible 12ppm for full-colour A4. It can also handle paper up to 279 x 432mm.

The 1200 range uses a different technology to colour lasers to achieve this turbo-charged printing. Standard lasers make passes for each colour over a single photo-conductive drum, but the 1200n can print a page with a single pass. It achieves this by having completely separate processes for each colour. The CMY and K toner cartridges are laid out in-line down the paper path and each unit has its own photo-conductive drum. Above each unit in the printer's lid are four LED arrays - again, one for each colour. Data can be sent to all four heads simultaneously. The process starts with magenta and passes through cyan and yellow, with black laid down last.

The Optra Color 1200n on review is the top of the range and comes with 64Mb of memory, PCL5c, PCL6 and PostScript 2 emulations along with a dual-speed MarkNet Ethernet print server card and Lexmark's superb MarkVision network management software. The controller board has some serious processing power with a 64-bit, 200MHz NEC RISC chip on board backed up by 512Kb of Level 2 cache. Four standard SIMM sockets allow memory to be boosted to 128Mb, although if you plan to upgrade start saving now as Lexmark charges a painful £1,190 for an extra 64Mb.

The 1200n measures 550 x 670 x 401mm (W x D x H) and weighs 63kg. Standard paper handling is up to 600 sheets spread across two 250-sheet trays and a 100-sheet, flip-down multipurpose

ADVERTISEMENT

tray. An optional lower tray can increase capacity to 850 sheets.

Despite masses of consumables, colour printing costs are very low. Toner cartridges last for 6,500 pages at five per cent coverage. The three colours each cost £90, while black costs £67. The photo-conductor rollers expire after 13,000 pages, with black at £63 and a complete colour set at £169. There's also a 100,000-page maintenance kit consisting of a transport belt, fuser unit and paper rollers which costs £410 and must be installed by a field engineer. Altogether, this gives a very reasonable figure of 7.3p per colour page and a less reasonable 1.9p per mono page.

The burning question is whether the 1200n can deliver the claimed speeds, and it can. The PC Pro 24-page test with masses of fonts, large colour graphics and charts at 600dpi resolution was dispatched in only 125 seconds for a speed of 11.5ppm. Boosting the resolution to a simulated 1,200dpi resulted in a slight drop to 11ppm. A3 printing was impressive, with a ten-page colour document completed in just 98 seconds at an average of 6ppm. Make no mistake - this printer is fast.

Unfortunately, what you gain in speed you lose in quality. LED page printers are afflicted by a crosshatched banding effect on photographic images. I've seen this on Oki's mono LED printers and the 1200n suffers from it as well. If you want high-quality photographic prints then look elsewhere.

For general graphics use, though, this effect won't pose a major problem. The 1200n delivered smooth fills and high levels of detail in the CorelDraw train test. Comparing results of the PC Pro colour performance chart with those from the Tektronix Phaser 550 EF (reviewed issue 22, p132) and HP's Colour LaserJet 5M (reviewed issue 19, p115) showed the 1200n making a better job of colour fades with almost imperceptible stepping. Grey shades using equal mixtures of cyan, magenta and yellow were also produced faithfully, although the banding was obvious on solid blocks of colour. Occasionally, the 1200n used too much magenta, and this was more noticeable on heavier grade paper.

No colour laser comes close to the Optra Color 1200n print speeds, although this is balanced by below-par print quality. However, you won't find any competition for A3 colour printing at this price. Even the Tektronix 380EF (reviewed issue 40, p166) which uses solid ink printing technology costs around £3,000 more and its colour printing costs are over twice as high. For general office duties or colour proofing, there's nothing that can touch the Optra Color 1200n.