Lexmark X502n color laser multifunction
Lexmark X502n color laser multifunction aimed squarely at small offices and work groups, the $700 Lexmark X502n prints, scans, copies, and faxes, and does it all quickly and well. The X502n isn’t perfect–it’s missing some fax features that are often important to offices–but if you can live without group dialing, secure-receive mode, and a junk-fax blocker, the X502n is an excellent choice. It’s one of the fastest lasers and its excellent speed doesn’t come at the expense of print quality. It’s also one of the more affordable lasers to maintain, thanks to reasonable print-refill costs.
The Lexmark X502n features a 366MHz processor and 128MB of nonupgradable memory. It offers both USB and Ethernet connectors, so it can be connected directly to a PC or on a network for a multiuser environment.
When copying, your options are standard: you can scale from 25 to 400 percent (preset or custom values); collate; and make 2-on-1 or 4-on-1 copies. There’s no duplexer, though, so you can’t make automatic double-sided prints
The Lexmark X502n basically is the fastest printer even compare to models that cost more. It cranked out black text at a rate of 19.71ppm (pages per minute), which was 5ppm faster than the $800 Xerox Phaser 6115MFP/N. The Lexmark X502 produced black graphics pages at a rate of 13.95ppm, a little slower than the Xerox, but still much faster than either the HP Color LaserJet CM1017 or the Samsung CLX-3160FN. With color printing, it was still the fastest of the pack, though not by such a wide margin: it produced color text at a rate of 6.97ppm and color graphics at a rate of 6.82ppm.
Often, great speeds come at the expense of quality, but happily, this isn’t the case with the Lexmark X502n. Its black text prints were basically perfect, which we would expect of a printer in this price range. Black graphics were also very good, marred only by faint horizontal lines. Color text was nearly perfect, though very close inspection revealed some inconsistencies in character formation. Color blending was very smooth, though. The color graphics print was a bit more problematic, but very good nevertheless. Color blocks were nicely saturated, gradients were smooth (though we saw banding in the grayscale gradient), and the photo elements were sharp and detailed. Our only big problems with this print were that the colors were a bit too ruddy and it had some problems handling barcode-style patterns.
Lexmark X502n color laser multifunction uses Lexmark C500H2KG high yield black laser toner cartridge, and C500H2CG, C500H2YG and C500H2MG high yield color laser toner cartridge which costs about $150 each