Lexmark – X500n review

Lexmark’s X500n is a multifunctional machine suitable for a small group or office. It has a scanner, an automatic document feeder and all these work well with the printer part of this machine. The machine is reasonably priced even with all these great features and this makes it a very interesting option for the buyers.

It has a 250 sheet paper tray from where the papers feed inside. An optional 530 sheet paper tray is also available. There is no feed for other media like envelopes, labels etc. The control panel has straightforward controls. The buttons are spaced properly and are user-friendly. It has a two line display which gives good results; though the background isn’t very appealing to eyes! Lexmark X500n has some pretty good software in the form of Abbyy FineReader for OCR and Presto PageManager for managing documents.

The printer operates at a decent rate of 31 pages per minute for black and white pages. The printing speed for color pages is around 8 pages per minute. As per the manufacturers, this is what the print speed should be. However in reality, it is actually a bit lower than this. A color copy takes around 31 seconds, from the Automatic Document Feeder (ADF) whereas flatbed takes 40 seconds for the same. A colored photo print is done in 24 seconds, which is quite good!

The print quality is usually good, though it depends upon what is being printed. Black texts are clear, well formed and clean. They are also not smudged up. Color graphics are also good. They appear to be well defined.  However the result isn’t very good, when some text is printed over color. The result for color photocopies is not very encouraging.

The photocopies do not appear to be as colorful as the originals. The areas of dark and solid color look dull and lack contrast. They may have a patchy appearance.
The machine comes with four toner cartridges. They are all stacked one above the other. There is also a developer unit and a waste toner bottle.

The developer unit hangs from the top most part of the printer section. It can be seen once the scanner is hinged. The black ink cartridge needs replacement after 5,000 pages whereas the colored cartridges need to be replaced after 3,000 pages. The consumables vary in their page yields. The toner waste bottle also needs to be replaced after 30,000 pages. The fuser lasts for 60,000 pages and photo developer for 120,000 pages. You might find all this quite frustrating and time consuming especially if you have large volume printing work.

Taking in consideration all the yields and prices, the running cost for color pages comes out to be 11p and 3p for mono. Both these figures aren’t really good! Overall Lexmark’s X500n is an all in one device which is price reasonably. It produced decent quality text at a decent speed. Its biggest drawbacks are its complicated consumables and high page running cost. There is also no multi purpose feed! All this may limit its popularity.

This device is perfect for small offices where too much prints are not required on a regular basis. Buying Lexmark’s X500n isn’t such a good idea when you work mostly involves printing graphics. Due to complicated and too many consumables, this isn’t good for large amount of work too!