Product Reviews

Although we've seen the Lexmark E240's black-and-silver colour scheme in other E series printers, it still stands out from the beige and grey plastics used by most other manufacturers. The E240 sits above the entry-level E120n in the range. Although it doesn't have that printer's network connection, it does have a parallel port and can print seven more pages per minute.

The E240 is quick and easy to set up. It arrives with a 1,500-page toner and 30,000-page imaging drum already installed. However, before you can print, you must pull them out to extract a small amount of shipping foam. Replacement toners have a capacity of 2,500 pages and cost around £56 including VAT, giving a cost per page of 2.3p, or 2.4p including the drum.

The paper input cassette is fully enclosed. Its output tray is shorter than a sheet of A4 paper, but

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there's a plastic flip-up guide that stops printed pages spilling on to the desktop. You can load the input tray with up to 250 sheets of plain paper, and feed individual sheets into the multipurpose slot above it. An additional 550-sheet drawer is available.

We chose the Standard installation in Lexmark's setup program and quickly had the E240 up and running. The printer dashed through all our print tests at an impressive pace, peaking at exactly 24ppm during our mono letter test. The first copy of the letter dropped into the printer's output tray in just 91/2 seconds.

There's nothing amiss with the E240's text quality. Fonts are dark and crisp, with no visible stepping at any quality setting. Graphics are rarely a mono printer's forte, though, and results from the E240 were a little disappointing. It failed to preserve subtle differences between shades in dark PowerPoint slides and illustrations. Our black-and-white test photo was quite dingy when printed at the default Normal setting. Choosing Best quality improved brightness and contrast, but there was still some fine banding. Our colour photo tests were better, even at the Normal setting.

The E240 is a capable text printer, and is impressively fast for this price. Unfortunately, it is far more expensive to run than many similarly priced printers. Samsung's ML-2250 is slightly slower, but it costs less to buy and run and produces better graphics.