Review: Lexmark C510n laser printer

Lexmark’s C510n ought to be a speed demon. Rated at 30ppm in mono and 8ppm in colour it has a considerable edge in engine speed.

It’s also fitted with a large 16 x 2 character dot matrix status display and control buttons, which provide access to full built-in help guides that can be printed directly from the front panel.

Printing costs can be kept down by using built-in account tracking features, and a ‘black-only’ driver allows system administrators to lock away colour capability from selected users by removing software support from their PCs.

Consumables are competitively priced and, were it not for Dell’s incredibly low prices, they would be the least expensive of the group.

In our tests, the printer delighted and disappointed in equal measure.

When printing simple mono text, the 30ppm mark was exceeded, coming in at a little over 32ppm. Simple colour pages were also reproduced at very close to the 8ppm speed.

In one colour test, speeds of over 12ppm were achieved. This is because the C510n was clever enough to spot that only magenta toner was required and skip the passes for the remaining colours.

Only Lexmark’s printer was able to do this; the remaining printers all ran at their rated colour speeds regardless.

Unfortunately, full-page colour photos took longer to print, with the C510n coming in slowest of all. Unexpected pauses during our mono mixed text and graphics test saw performance slashed to around 13ppm.

Fitted with USB and network ports, the C510n is already well connected, but serial, parallel and even wireless 802.11g cards can be added for maximum flexibility, as can auto duplexing and a 530-sheet additional paper tray.

You can use the C510n with just about anything including Mac OS 8.x and up, Linux, Novell and Unix.

This is part of a group test on budget colour laser printers. Other articles are:
Introduction and editor's choice
Canon Laser Shot LBP 5200
Dell 3100cn
Epson Aculaser C1100N
HP Color Laserjet 2600n
Konica Minolta Magicolor 2430DL
Oki C3200
Xerox Phaser 6120
The Real Cost of Printing