Lexmark T650DN mono workgroup laser printer
Low cost, good; low paper capacity, bad
Review The more people using a printer, the bigger it has to be, if only to hold extra paper. In fact, workgroup printers seem to have to be big simply to impress more people. Lexmark’s T650DN starts large and is eminently expandable, so will only get larger.
Lexmark's T650DN: a big printer, but quick and cheap to run
Lexmark may have a reputation for cheap but uninspired inkjet all-in-ones, but its laser printers are generally well regarded, a product of its heritage as IBM’s printer division and something it has never really lost. The T650DN is designed as a duplex workgroup printer with a high throughput and considerable expandability.
Well, perhaps 'designed as a duplex printer' is overstating it. The ‘DN’ version of the printer is supplied with a separate duplexing unit which fits underneath the main machine. This has the advantage of being quicker than an internal duplexer, which feeds each sheet to the output tray and then rolls it back in for the second side, but on the downside it increases the footprint considerably and looks like the boot on a 1930s Armstrong Siddeley, though not as well integrated.
The T650DN is a substantial machine and, even though it’s rated at a hefty 200,000 pages maximum duty cycle - 5000-20,000 average - we’re not convinced it has to be this big. Rival machines in the same class, from companies like Kyocera Mita, are quite a bit less bulky.
This is particularly true as the main paper tray has a capacity of just 350 sheets. This is a ridiculously small amount of paper to put in a machine intended for use by a fair few folk at once and means somebody will have to restock it virtually every day.
The control panel includes a security keypad and USB socket
You can, of course, add extra paper trays, with capacities from 550 sheets up to 1000 sheets, but these are optional extras. Cynics might think the small size of the main tray, even given the additional, pull-down, 100-sheet multi-purpose tray, is designed primarily to encourage sales of options. Other extras include stackers, envelope feeders and staplers, so you can expand the machine to a considerable extent as your printing requirements grow.
COMMENTS
@JC Small is Beautiful
So, we should all drive buses 'cos there's more room for the engines, should we? Every office has space constraints and, particularly if a printer is to be positioned on a desk, the space it takes up is an important consideration.
Engineering something small may put more contraint on the designer, but there's no intrinsic reason why a smaller printer should be less reliable. The reliability indexes for all the major laser manufacturers are very similar, so companies that are building smaller machines aren't suffering from service-life issues.
As for a bigger printer keeping the paper flatter, that's hogwash. The designed temperature and pressure used in the fuser is by far the biggest factor in paper curl. Whether a machine uses a 'U'-shaped or 'S'-shaped paper path governs the tighness of turns in the paper path much more than the size of the case.
Big
Regarding being big, it was erroneously suggested that is bad.
Bigger size, even if all else were equal which it seldom is, is a very desirable thing.
Bigger means lesser size limitations for gears, springs, plastic tabs, fuser heat dissipation, drum and cartridge size, etc, etc. Smaller means higher heat density, tighter paper path,
In other words, only a stupid fool thinks smaller is better unless it's on an airplane or in some economized oriental hotel slat. This printer was not designed to fit within your back pocket wearing spandex jeans, it was designed to do well as a printer.
Do realize I am not shilling Lexmark, I would rather buy from most other manufacturers than those toner and ink whoring bassturds, but at the same time we need to stop perpetuating the idiotic idea that smaller is better unless you live in a shoebox.
Smaller is never better when it comes to anything mechanical, if all else is equal then smaller is always, always, a negative thing. Especially so when talking about a 2nd element, how much paper will bend in the printer before it remains permanently more curled that you wanted a flat piece of paper to be.
If you want some small cheap junk printer by all means buy one. If you want something not so problematic, you want the largest size per dollar you can find. Per page printing cost is another story, subject to more than one variable like toner capacity, cost whether the drum is integral or not, whether a cartridge is user-refillable, etc.
These things weren't mentioned though, my comment is only addressing detrimental ideal that we are supposed to want smaller as if it is good when it is exactly the problem and thing to avoid.
Paris, because even if you don't live in Texas, smaller is less of a good thing more often than not.
