Lexmark C534dn Printer Review
Colour lasers for small businesses spend the majority of their time churning out black and white business documents.
Nevertheless, they also need to have the ability to include color and, occasionally, generate a top of the range looking color presentations as well as pictures.
The Lexmark C534dn can do all of this with speed and ease – and at an amount that won’t break the bank.
Having a 100,000-page duty cycle, the C534dn is a heavy-duty machine built to be shared on a small venture LAN, in spite of being light enough (just) to be picked up by a person.
It also includes the toner cartridges installed; thus, setting up is just a matter of sliding it from the box, removing the packaging, and attaching it to electrical power and LAN outlets.
USB and Ethernet interfaces come as standard on this design, in addition to a built-in multi-protocol print server, with the standard web-based interface for remote management. A duplexer, for two-sided printing, additionally comes as usual and is effective.
Nonetheless, the built-in, 250-sheet paper tray isn’t all that good on a laser made for shared network use, and we’d strongly suggest the optionally available additional 550-sheet dish designed to fit below.
Take note, though, that when set up to take A4, the paper trays protrude from the back, expanding the footprint by a good three inches.
On the positive side, the front of the main tray folds down to uncover the 100-sheet multipurpose feeder, which in turn is a very nice feature. The four toner cartridges are easily accessible from the front.
Those delivered along with it rated for approximately 6,000 pages, with a selection of yield on replacements as high as 7,000 pages for color and 8,000 pages for the black toner.
Photoconductor units for the black and color cartridges will be necessary every 20,000 pages. Although the cartridges are simple to swap, the procedure can be extremely dirty.
When it comes to quality, it is critical to stress that, like the majority of business laser printers, you shouldn’t choose the Lexmark C534dn only for professional graphics printing. Concerning day-to-day business documents; nonetheless, it is superb, and, as needed, it will also produce striking color presentations, with many different controls to help tweak the output.
Even so, it was better to left untouched rather than spend your time and paper attempting to improve on the defaults.
An additional feature of the C534dn is its user-friendly interface, with a substantial color display and related keypad. Using this it is possible to save documents to the printer safely, then print them by entering the appropriate Pin code. There is also a USB port for printing without using PDF documents from a memory stick.
On the overall performance, the Lexmark laser acquitted itself nicely. The first page took about 11 seconds show up, after which monochrome A4 pages are created at up to 22ppm and just a bit more slowly (21ppm) where color included.
On the downside, printed pages are dumped right into a well at the top, with no finishing possibilities. Neither are you able to add a customized envelope feeder, which may be an issue for some buyers?
