Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Let's get the pros out of the way first:
- The setup is easy and straightforward
- The print quality is pretty good for a printer in this price range
- Speed is acceptable, even in color
- It's not as noisy or bulky as other color lasers I've owned
Now for the rest.
This printer is obviously designed for *very* light duty printing. The specs say the paper tray will hold 250 pages but I couldn't get more than about 200 in without bending paper. The specs also claim the output area will hold 100 pages, and that's nonsense. I printed a 74 page manual, and got a jam after 52 pages.
And that's when the fun began...
I cleared the jam, but the printer refused to recognize that the jam was cleared. It kept insisting the jam was still there.
At the same time, the Lexmark Status Monitor just quit working. I got Vista's dreaded "This program has stopped working" dialog. (I'm on 64 bit Vista Ultimate.)
So I turned the printer off and on. The good news is that it realized it wasn't jammed. The bad news was it began spewing pages of random garbage. (I realize Vista's print spooler was partially responsible for this.) Stabbing the Cancel button on the printer stopped it after about a dozen pages.
So I went to Vista's print manager, and tried to cancel the job. Nothing I could do would effect a cancel. Since this functionality worked fine on the printer this one replaced, this has to be the fault of the Lexmark driver.
So I rebooted Vista, and the cancel still didn't take. This time I let the manual run (carefully taking pages from the output area about every 15 or 20). But I don't know what I would have done if I really needed to cancel.
I really hate to submit a negative review, because my initial impressions were quite good. I suppose if you use this little guy for very light duty work, you would probably be fine. The hardware seems well worth the price if the drivers worked better. Perhaps the XP drivers do work better, and the Vista drivers just have not been worked on enough. (By the way, the same driver disk applies to the C543 and the C544, so I would presume they have the same problems on Vista I discussed above.)
I finally did get six nice copies of my manual. This thing was so inexpensive, and I've used so much of its toner, that I don't feel right taking it back, so I'm keeping it. But you can bet the next time I print manuals it will be Lulu or a quick copy place.
*** Update Sept 7, 2009
I've worked with this printer a month now, and I'm telling you outright: If you have Vista, especially 64 bit, don't buy it.
The software that comes on the disk with the printer is simply unusable on Vista 64 bit. The problems I discussed above are still there, and I've discovered more.
I finally uninstalled everything that was installed from the disk, and went to Lexmark's site to get something better. That seems to work a bit better so far (at least print jobs can now be cancelled), but it took power user experience and some inspired guessing to locate the right download. Their support web site is just awful.
I now wish I had taken this thing back, even after using up its toner. It has cost me hours trying to make it work.
A note about Windows 7 based on their web site. When Windows 7 is released in stores (it's already in the hands of corporations and MSDN subscribers) only then will Lexmark EVEN SAY WHEN DRIVERS MIGHT BE AVAILABLE. So I wouldn't expect the driver situation to get better any time soon with Windows 7 (for any Lexmark printer).
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