Lexmark E 323

...look no further than the Lexmark E323.

The first thing that you will notice about this printer when you eagerly unwrap it from its box is the colour.

AT LAST !! We have a printer that isn’t the normal beigey/white/greyish colour that most IT equipment seems to be, you know the colour that’s going to have a horrible yellowish tinge in a few months time no matter if you smoke or not....

This is the printer ...
...has just proved that my Lexmark E323 printer only takes 30 seconds until its ready to print.

Another quick press of the "continue" button will print off a self-test which takes 10 seconds between me pressing the button and being able to read the sheet (and no fear of smudging)

Print quality is 600 x 600 dpi (dots per inch). You can certainly notice a difference in sharpness between a letter printed by a laser ... more

If you’re looking for a small, quick and reliable laser printer that won't break the bank, then look no further than the Lexmark E323.

The first thing that you will notice about this printer when you eagerly unwrap it from its box is the colour.

AT LAST !! We have a printer that isn’t the normal beigey/white/greyish colour that most IT equipment seems to be, you know the colour that’s going to have a horrible yellowish tinge in a few months time no matter if you smoke or not....

This is the printer to break the mold, it’s a bright charcoal colour, finished with silver detail, and two bright chromed silver buttons for continuing or cancelling your print.

Up until now many of us may not have considered a laser printer for our home. But with the price of consumables coming down and also the actual footprint size of the printer being reduced then this is a real option.

The printer itself is reasonably priced (I paid £275 in May 04 - which included a cartridge), as with most IT equipment, the price is sure to come down in time.

According to Lexmark, you can expect to print 3000 sheets (@ 5% coverage) per cartridge.
So if you work out that if a cartridge costs around £80. It will cost you around 2p per print. Compare that with the average cost of black inkjet printing at between 5p - 10p per page.
You’re going to save more the longer that you own the printer and your initial investment is recovered.

Obviously the big disadvantage of owning this laser printer over an inkjet is that you can't print colour.

The solution to this could be to have both. I estimate that about 95% of all the printing that I do is black on white. Whereas I find that most of the printing that my kids do is colour. So I’ve set up my trusty inkjet (Epson Stylus C84) in their room and the laser printer is next to my PC.

When you plug in and fire up the printer, you will notice the quick warm up time. A quick test has just proved that my Lexmark E323 printer only takes 30 seconds until its ready to print.

Another quick press of the "continue" button will print off a self-test which takes 10 seconds between me pressing the button and being able to read the sheet (and no fear of smudging)

Print quality is 600 x 600 dpi (dots per inch). You can certainly notice a difference in sharpness between a letter printed by a laser printer and that printed on an inkjet. A clever bit of ingenuity incorporated into the print driver from Lexmark will improve the image quality to 1200dpi.

I mentioned earlier the size of the actual printer being fairly small. Its exact measurements are 40cm x 36cm and 24 cm tall.

The printer seems easy enough to set up. Included in the box is a self booting driver CD. This is for both home and business use, so you have the options to just load the drivers to your PC if you’re printing over a local port or to load the printer drivers over a network.
Also included on the CD are tools to remotely manage the printer over a network, true type fonts, Arabic fonts, Hebrew fonts and even OCR and Barcode fonts.
The printer has the standard parallel port connection and a USB port.

On the top of the printer are a small row of LED's that will show you when the printer is ready or if you need paper or toner or if you have a paper jam.

Reliability wise, I have not had any problems with the printer. Lexmark provide excellent help via their website, should you have any problems. It appears to be a simple rear feed mechanism with a single pick-up roller. In the past I have had problems with pick up rollers becoming dirty after heavy use, but this is easily solved by applying a small amount of "platenclene" (Print Roller Cleaner and Restorer) which is easily available from computer shops, for about £3 a tin.

The only downside to me personally is the 150-sheet rear feed. This means that I can't push the printer up against the wall at the back of my desk. An optional 250-sheet paper draw is available for approximately £100 if it means that much to you.

The standard memory is 16MB and the printer sports an impressive 200 Mhz processor.
It is compatible with Microsoft operating systems up to Windows XP and Linux. (Check with Lexmark for compatibility with other OS's) and can print seamlessly on Plain Paper, Transparencies, Envelopes, Card and Labels.

The standard warranty in the UK is 1 year, and extended warranties are available to suit your needs.

In summary then the Lexmark E323 is a good-looking printer. Its one of the quickest printers that I have ever used, with an impressive time between switching on and being ready to print.
 

...less