SOHO Users’ Choice: Lexmark C500N Color Laser Printer for Fast Professional Document Output

Segmented for SOHO users and price-sensitive business users, the Lexmark C500n has the typical look and weight of laser printers in the market. It is quite bulky and occupies substantial space. It stands 18.9 inches wide, 16.5 inches deep, and 15.2 inches tall and weighs a back-breaking 66 pounds. It allows you to create professional, high quality colour documents with 2,400 image quality for your personal and business use. Though it leaves a big footprint, it’s also able to produce documents real fast once you get it connected and installed.

This Lexmark C500 allows users to print complex color jobs quickly with speeds of 31ppm in monochrome, 8ppm in color with time to first print as fast as 13 seconds in mono and 19 seconds in color.

It is about 29kg in weight, so you might need a helping hand to unload it and remove it from the box. After that, you can easily handle the installation of the machine’s toner cartridges as the unit features front supply access. The onboard control panel is simple with very few but important buttons which respond swiftly to cancellation requests, thus saving you from wasting toner on half-baked printouts.

The Lexmark C500n accepts universal serial bus (USB) and Ethernet interfaces. It is network-ready (wired only), which is a boon in a multiuser environment. C500n supports both Mac and Windows PCs. It comes with 64MB of nonexpandable memory and a 200MHz processor. It has no duplexer, so double-sided printing is a manual operation.

The installation of C500n is a little bit tricky. Some users complained that in certain platforms, you may need to click “Replace existing driver” in the installation set-up regardless of the fact that you have never installed the driver for specific printer model before. Besides, it is particular about the paper used for printing. You will need to correctly define the paper type and size.

Other users’ feedback also revealed that Lexmark consumables are pricey: the standard black toner cartridge (2,500 pages) costs $90, and the standard color cartridges (1,500 pages) cost $98.45 each. If you do a lot of printing, you’re better off with the high-yield cartridges: the black (5,000 pages) will run you $134.70 and the color cartridges (3,000 pages) are $119.70. If not, your alterative cost saving solution is to send the empty cartridges to Lexmark for recycling.

Apart from the above problem, the C500n is a delight to work with. Like most laser printers, it takes a few seconds to process the printing sent from your computer, even when the jobs sent for printing are pretty large. It takes 21:85 seconds to print 5 pages of pull page text document (black only) and 53.01 seconds to print 5 copies of brochures or flyers involving text of different colour.

The C500n’s interface also offers colour adjustment options for documents, graphics, photographs and more. For photographs, it is recommended that you choose the option “No colour adjustment” as sometimes the colour processed printouts do not reflect what you actually see on your computer screen. Still, a preset you might want to try out is the Colour Matching option.

In summary, the Lexmark C500n is a basic, single-function color laser printer geared for small offices and home offices. It costs you around US$400 for this single-function machine. Is it cheap or costly? Just share what’s the CNET’s editor’s review on this:

“After reviewing a bunch of multifunction color printers recently, $400 seems like a lot for a single-function machine. The C500n’s fast print speeds and network-readiness, however, make it a good addition for small offices that have high-volume text printing needs. Although, for about the same price, the Samsung CLP-510n offers a duplexer, and the Konica Minolta Magicolor 2430DL serves up a PictBridge port. If you have the budget, a color laser multifunction is a cash- and space-efficient option; it saves you from having to purchase separate devices, then find room for them. At $899, the HP Color LaserJet 2840 is more than twice the price of the Lexmark C500n, but it includes fax, copier, and scanner functions–useful in any office environment. If you’re happy with the functions of the C500n but just want a speedier option, check out Lexmark’s own C522n, which printed color text and graphics at about twice the speed of the C500n and has more expandability options, too.”

Read more about Lexmark C500n’s specification here.