Lexmark E332n

The faade of Lexmark's E332n isn't the beige box we expected but an imposing and stylish black and silver delight. It's also fully featured with its USB 2, parallel and 10/100 Ethernet ports. Minor concerns lie with the plastic flap, which is needed to stop the outputted sheets dropping on the floor, and the hieroglyphic status lights, which will confuse rather than enlighten casual users. But the only true downside it that it sounds like a small vacuum cleaner.

It produced excellent crisp text at a rate of 25.6ppm - satisfyingly near its quoted rate of 26ppm and somewhat faster than the 20ppm Kyocera FS-1020D (see A List, p45). It also has a processing time of just four seconds compared with its rival's 13. Printing our colour letterhead didn't slow it down at all - the 200MHz processor and 32MB of RAM cope easily with such work.

Our Excel workbook test - which uses shaded spreadsheets, uniformly filled graphs and charts - often cripples small lasers, so we were impressed that processing time remained four seconds and the rate dropped to only 21.8ppm. However, quality fell a little: shaded backgrounds were reproduced with coarse dots instead of the fine grey matrix of other printers. The darker the background, the more it interfered with the figures in each cell. Some dark cells with small fonts became illegible. Uniform fills, while not suffering banding, did suffer detail loss due to the darkness of the print - it was a similar story when we printed high-quality colour and mono pictures.

Pictures in our DTP document were good enough to illustrate what should be there and a print speed of 25.5ppm makes it attractive if you don't like hanging around. Running costs are reasonable, but this is one area where the Kyocera beats it, falling as low as 0.68p per page. The FS-1020D is also cheaper, relegating the Lexmark's appeal to those text printers primarily seeking speed.

Author: Nick Ross