Review on 📄 Enhance Paper Handling Efficiency with Lexmark 550-Sheet Tray (40C2100) by Jeff Hall

Revain Vine got me a "Lexmark CS720DE Color Laser Printer (40C9100)" for review. Being a workgroup printer, it should not be considered from a home user's point of view as it is overly efficient in terms of high performance and possibly underpowered in terms of features as well. For this review, I tested it with a friend in a research lab staffed by eight scientists. The lab already has an "HP Laserjet Pro M477fdw Wireless All-in-One Color Printer (CF379A#BGJ)" that was purchased when the room was furnished this spring. Sure, HP is an all-in-one, but we thought we could compare the printing capabilities just to give you an idea. I'll briefly touch on the Lexmark feature as Revain has already done a great job introducing it. It features two-sided (two-sided) printing, a 550-sheet paper tray, a 4.3-inch color touchscreen, and Ethernet, USB, and parallel port connectivity. If you need additional paper input space, Lexmark sells additional paper trays. Lexmark also sells a wireless printing and NFC solution if needed. And if you need more speed than 40ppm, Lexmark makes a 20% faster CS725 that can run at 50ppm instead. In this overview, we follow the most common practice of connecting a printer to an Ethernet switch. We register its Ethernet address on the network and set up our workstations for IPP printing. Setting up the printer was easy and nice, and we're both scientists, not sysadmins. We point out that this is where the modern touchscreen interface really shines. However, since setting up a printer isn't a common event, it's not worth putting much emphasis on. Likewise, downloading a printer driver and installing it on our workstations is a snap. Lexmark claims a first page speed of 6 seconds. I'm not sure how this is measured (is it counting from the time the last byte of the first page arrived?), but in practice we see more than 8 seconds when the page is just text. If the page contains graphics, it easily takes more than 10 seconds. Well, those are really good numbers: for comparison, the HP (which is also connected to Ethernet, although it has Wi-Fi) is consistently at least 3 seconds slower in every test we've run. In fact, Lexmark really shines at complex graphics and prints pages much faster than its competitor HP, showing off its quad-core 1.2GHz processor. (Note that we didn't even upgrade the RAM: Lexmark has 1GB, and you can upgrade it up to 3GB.) In terms of color reproduction, we actually think the Lexmark is more saturated at its default settings than the one HB. This is very noticeable in bar charts and pie charts, for example. OTOH the photos are equally disappointing on both but to be honest I wasn't impressed with either color photo laser. For black and white text, we think both are equally sharp, but we also give Lexmark the edge. Maybe Lexmark toner is more reflective? Somehow the output from Lexmark looks a bit clearer. However, Lexmark loses out to HP when it comes to paper handling. During the month we tested this pair, Lexmark blocked much more frequently. Of course, this depends heavily on the paper used (we use OfficeMax accessories), although there's hardly any scientific test to determine which printer is better at handling jams. However, we suspect that Lexmark's higher speed (HP rates it at 28 pages per minute) actually makes the problem worse, which actually reflects our experience with other high-speed printers. Often the paper jam occurs at the first entry in the tray and we really don't know what can be done to reduce the frequency of paper jams. (We've spilled paper before loading, and we don't reload.) Both HP and Lexmark offer high-yield cartridges, but the listed cost-per-page and print speeds are for reference only. - The time it takes to tell the difference is always more expensive than the cost difference over the life of this printer. We decided to skip this aspect. So how can we recommend this printer to the target audience? Decided to bet 4/5. Print quality is top-notch, and for an Ethernet-connected workgroup printer, we really have no complaints. However, there are two things we fear. The first is the paper jam discussed above, and we've decided to deduct a star for that. Second, the fact that there is only one output bin and no stapling option seems limiting. (And we don't even consider it just a printer when the same amount of space could be spent on a multifunction device.)