Editors' Rating
Published: 01 Mar 2005
The £485 (ex. VAT) network-ready Lexmark T430dn delivers the speed, the efficiency, the excellent output and the expandability essential for workgroups. Plus, it has well-designed drivers and makes two-sided prints.
Compact for a serious business printer, the Lexmark T430dn measures 40.6cm wide by 42.5cm deep by25.8cm high and weighs only 14.3kg with its toner installed. The attractive-looking control panel on top is festooned with shiny silver, red and green navigation buttons, along with a backlit LCD that covers many of the software driver's functions and menus for making adjustments to things such as PostScript emulation and networking settings.
The T430dn comes with the standard array of trays, including a main 250-sheet cartridge on the bottom; a 100-sheet multi-purpose tray for manual feeds, envelopes and special media; there's room for 150 pages of output on top. A back door opens to provide a straight paper path so that heavier pages won't get stuck or crinkle. The 350-sheet capacity is skimpy if you're going to subject this equipment to a several-person work flow; a bigger office might want to add another 250-sheet tray for £119 (ex. VAT) or a 500-sheet tray for £156 (ex. VAT).
This printer ships with 64MB of RAM, which can be upgraded to 320MB in total. You may want more RAM if you plan on printing complex documents, such as those using PostScript 3 and PCL 6 languages. The printer is compatible with various operating systems, including Windows 98 and up, Macintosh 8.6 and higher, plus Linux and Unix.
Setting up the T430dn on a network is simple: just follow the manual, and you'll be up and running in minutes. The two CDs that come with the printer contain documentation and a great set of software drivers. These drivers follow the usual tab format, where you can tweak the page layout and the number of copies, and set the printer to collate multi-page documents. Along the right side of the interface, icons of the printer and a page change as you adjust the settings.
In the driver window, your settings show up as a clickable list, so you can jump directly to any item without searching through the tabs. The software also has more print-quality settings than on most monochrome lasers. You can set the resolution manually up to 1,200 by 1,200dpi or to an enhanced 2,400dpi, and you can adjust the toner darkness, contrast and dithering.
On the Other Options tab, the great print job management settings include account tracking, which is ideal for lawyers, design firms and others who bill by the hour. If you enable this feature, a screen pops up asking you for an account number every time you try to print. Then you can print a report that divides jobs by account. The Print And Hold feature lets you proof a copy before releasing the rest of the job manually, and a confidentiality option in the control panel requests a PIN before the job will print.
The T430dn's performance in our tests was excellent across the board. Text and graphics sped out of this printer at a speedy 22.58 text pages per minute (ppm) and 21.74ppm for graphics, placing it just behind the Xerox Phaser 4500B.
But speed isn't this printer's only strong point. Text prints were sharp and very dark in our tests, while graphics looked surprisingly good for a laser printer; the T430dn handled gradients, line drawings and shaded backgrounds with aplomb, and even photographic images were remarkably smooth and detailed.
Digg
Slashdot
Del.ici.ous
Stumble
Reddit
