PRINTER REVIEW

Lexmark C762n review

8.0

Editors' Rating

Service & support		8.0
Design		8.0
Features		8.0
Performance		8.0

Dan Littman CNET

Published: 02 Dec 2004

Sub-£500 colour laser printers such as the HP Color LaserJet 2550L and the Samsung CLP-500 are storming the market, but an £1,199 (ex. VAT) machine such as the Lexmark C762n might be a better choice for a fast-paced office that requires complicated paper handling and wants to track printing per employee or account. It's better to pay more up front for a powerful machine if you can't afford to skimp on such functions in the long run. You can also customise the C762n with Lexmark's wide assortment of paper-handling options for printing envelopes or long jobs.

Against other mid-range printers we've tested, the Lexmark C762n printed colour the fastest and yielded especially attractive text quality. We found only minor details to criticise, but be prepared to pay the price if you want a colour laser printer with such sophisticated features. For about £180 (ex. VAT) less, consider the Lexmark C760n, which supports an optional duplexer and a 500-sheet paper tray but not the C762n's other paper-handling options.

Design

The Lexmark C762n looks deceptively simple. Its two-tone grey-plastic shell bulges slightly across the front and the top, with the control panel at the crest. The printer is remarkably compact for a colour laser built around a horizontal single-pass engine, which processes one colour at a time. Still, this machine is too bulky for small work spaces. At 60.4cm wide by 47cm deep by 52.8cm high, it weighs more than 47.7kg and for no sensible reason has handgrips on only one side, which turns moving the machine into a workout. You'll find the power switch on the back of the C762n, where it's easy to reach if you're familiar with it but no fun to grope for if you don't.

The control panel's two-line LCD lacks backlighting, which may force you to squint to read it in poor light. But it's easy to navigate, thanks to a clear menu hierarchy and well-designed buttons. Six menu buttons line the narrow strip under the LCD -- four for moving sideways and up and down through the menus and two for increasing or decreasing option values. The menus include basics such as a quick view of toner levels. They also let you set network configurations and correct colours.

On the C762n's right side, two doors expose possible paper-jam sites and the printer's fuser. The 100-page auxiliary tray on the left side saves space by opening at a 20-degree angle rather than lying flat. But to adjust the tray's sticky paper-width guide, we had to open it completely; you'll need to give the C762n room on both sides. The printer's front flips up to expose paper-jam sites and the four combination toner/drum cartridges. The cartridges smoothly slide straight in and out of the machine; a thumb-pull on the front edge and a strap along the top makes them easy to grab. A few flaps on the printer's shell are for adding paper-handling options such as the sorter stapler.

If you want to expand the printer's default 128MB of memory, you can access the DIMM expansion slot by unscrewing the metal sheet on the back wall of the machine. The printer supports up to a whopping 640MB -- double the maximum of the earlier C510n -- which should keep your Photoshop-wielding graphics department happy. But Lexmark charges heavily for RAM upgrades, so buy your memory elsewhere. You can plug in a 20GB hard drive to store fonts and reusable documents such as forms. Other slots on the controller support flash-memory cards that make it possible to print bar codes or encrypt documents stored on the printer.

Features

Setting up the Lexmark C762n under Windows XP was straightforward. We just inserted the installer CD into the PC connected to the machine, let it run automatically, clicked OK a few times, then plugged in the USB cable. You'll probably connect this printer to your office network via its Ethernet interface, which should be just as smooth. Once you install Lexmark's driver on your print server and enter the printer's IP address on the C762n's control panel, clients will see the printer and can grab its driver with a couple of clicks.

The C762n's driver comes with colour-print permissions that you can set so that users have to enter a password before printing in colour. This prevents long-term toner waste. The account-tracking feature is useful for law offices and accounting firms that want to assign print jobs to their clients' bills. Among its sophisticated features, this printer's driver lets you reduce multiple pages and print them on one sheet, blow up a page into a multi-page poster complete with crop marks, and control colour-matching and density settings. The Print And Hold feature lets you send a document to the printer and examine one copy before releasing the whole job; alternately, it can hold the document until you enter a password. And through Lexmark's MarkVision network printer-management software, your office network guru can monitor and fine-tune network operations.

The Lexmark C762n's support for high-end add-ons can boost the cost considerably. The basic model ships with a 100-sheet auxiliary tray and a 500-sheet main tray, but if your budget allows, you can add enough paper-handling equipment to bury the printer itself. Among the available options are an external duplexer that rests under the main tray, a second 500-sheet feeder and a 2,000-sheet feeder. Lexmark also sells a envelope drawer, an output expander that adds 650 pages to the 250-page main output tray, and a five-bin mailbox that separates users' jobs.

Two other add-ons accommodate exotic media such as banners. A tray that slips into grooves in the auxiliary tray feeds 8.5in.-by-36in. banner paper. The auxiliary tray can feed the occasional sheet of Lexmark's outdoor media, but if you plan to use that a lot, Lexmark recommends dedicating a tray to it.

Compared to the accessories, toner and other consumables for the C762n are modestly priced. The printer ships with 6,000-page starter cartridges, but if you replace them with the 15,000-page models and return the empties to Lexmark, black toner will cost you a cheap 0.65 pence per page and colour just under 5p per page. That compares well to the 0.74p per black page and 6.8p per colour page of the Xerox Phaser 8400B and the 1.1p for black and 8.1p for colour of the HP Color LaserJet 2550L.

Performance

We liked the quality of the Lexmark C762n's output -- especially its ordinary text, which was black but not heavy and appeared evenly weighted in different fonts and sizes. If you're printing complicated contracts loaded with fine print, you'll be glad to know that the C762n's tiniest type sizes are legible. Colour text was bright and nearly neon, but it was pale in places, with some fading at the very tops and bottoms of letters.

We found greyscale images on the C762n gritty but detailed, with a greyish cast because of the lack of contrast. This laser captured detail well and preserved faint lines and objects in colour graphics, although images showed an annoying stepping between shades and were too red, rendering flesh tones pinkish and bright. But bear in mind, colour lasers are designed to print graphics; save the photos for an inkjet printer.

The Lexmark C762n sailed though our performance tests with excellent printing speed in all categories. In monochrome print tests, at 16.9 pages per minute (ppm) for text and 15ppm for graphics, the Lexmark ranked among the fastest laser printers. But its colour print speed impressed us the most, pumping out up to 14.1ppm for text and 13.6ppm for graphics -- one of the fastest colour lasers we've tested. Considering that most printers print colour at around a sluggish 4ppm, the Lexmark C762n's speed is phenomenal.

This printer was tested at its default settings, which you can adjust to match your needs.

Service & support

The Lexmark C762n ships with a well-illustrated printed setup guide that covers unpacking, assembling and connecting the machine. A CD full of PDF manuals provides thorough information on using, maintaining and managing the printer. If the network is already operating correctly, even without networking expertise, you can probably do a basic installation of this printer and perform essential management tasks such as setting up security or optimizing performance over the network.

Lexmark covers the printer with a standard one-year warranty, and you can buy longer coverage if need be. The company runs its email technical support service 24/7 and staffs its toll-free technical support call centre from 9am to 5.50pm Monday to Friday. The Lexmark Web site also provides a searchable knowledge base, downloadable drivers and documentation.