Review The boundary between colour inkjet and colour laser printers continues to blur, as the colour quality of lasers improves and the speed and paper-handling of inkjets is ratcheted up too. There’s a price-band in the middle, around the £200-250 mark, where colour lasers, like Lexmark’s C543DN, can make a lot of sense.

Lexmark's C543DN: new colour engine on board

Lexmark may have a reputation as a stack-‘em-high, sell-'em-cheap inkjet manufacturer, but its laser printer heritage goes back to when it was IBM’s business printer division. It has a solid technological base, and this small workgroup printer includes a newly designed colour laser engine and some useful extras which could make for cost savings.

The grey and off-white case is unusually low of profile for a colour laser, and pages feed from a 250-sheet tray at the bottom to a raised output tray on the printer’s top surface. There’s a single-sheet feed built in right at the bottom, at desk level, which helps align special media. An optional second paper tray adds a 550-sheet unit and converts the single-sheet feed into a 100-sheet multi-purpose tray.

The control panel on top includes a 16-character, two-line back-lit display, but this uses a reduced dot matrix, so no letters have true descenders – ‘g’, ‘j’, ‘p’ and ‘y’ all sit above the line. This is a surprisingly cut-price choice in a machine costing £250. Controls are a simple set of six buttons: to move left and right through menus, an OK button for option selection and another for backing out. There’s a manual job-cancel button, marked Stop, too.

It’s a shame the front-panel USB socket, for walk-up and PictBridge printing, isn’t included on the C543DN as it is on the machine’s higher-priced sibling, the C544n. The only connections on this machine are USB 2.0 and Ethernet, and both direct and network links are easy to set up. The installation software guides you through the process and the physical unpacking will probably take longer than setting the thing up, as there are innumerable packing pieces hidden in different parts of the mechanism.

Network ready - and easy to set up

This isn’t helped by the designer’s decision to put the toner cartridges down the side of the printer, rather than at the front or on top, which is more conventional. To get at them, you lift a flap on the right-hand side of the printer and they clip in, more like inkjet cartridges than a toner pack.

One of the key features of the C543DN is that it ships with 2000-page "high-yield" colour toner cartridges and a 2500-page black one. This really just shows how commonplace it has become for manufacturers to cripple their new machines with ‘starter’ cartridges, often holding only half the volume of toner of even the standard-yield replacements.

Simple controls and a strange, throwback LCD display

Given the cost of toner, this is a particularly cynical cut-back, as it forces you to step onto the consumables treadmill that much sooner. By comparison, a ten-year-old Lexmark Optra R Plus, admittedly a mono laser, uses a high-yield drum and toner cartridge which runs for a far more healthy 14,000 pages. That's the only consumable on the Optra R, too, where here you have a separate imaging kit and waste toner bottle to replace, as well as the toner cartridges.

The C543DN is a new model with new consumables and these are available from fewer outlets than will be the case over time. More competition means lower prices, so you can expect to see them drop from the values quoted here. That’s just as well, as we calculate page costs of 2.5p for an ISO black page and 11.3p for colour. That’s using high-yield cartridges and includes VAT.

Neither of these costs is particularly impressive and the colour page cost is high when compared to many of the machine’s rivals. For example, a Canon i-SENSYS LBP5100, costing around the same to buy, gives equivalent page costs of 1.7p and 8.3p - a full 3p less for printing colour.

Lexmark claims maximum print speeds of 20ppm for both black and colour pages and we got quite close to the black speed under test, though not to the colour. A five-page text print took 35s, for a speed of just over 8.5ppm, but on a longer, 20-page test, it achieved nearly 17ppm. Considering all runs were in a normal print mode, these speeds are reasonable.

The toner cartridges fit down the side

A five-page black text and colour graphics print took 29s, or just over 10ppm, and it’s hard to see that a longer print run would increase this speed substantially. A 15 x 10cm photo print on an A4 sheet took 23s, which is again a fair speed.

Selecting the printer’s duplex function, which halves paper costs whenever it’s used, brings the speed down, so the 20-side black text test produced a speed of just 9ppm. The more convoluted paper path needed for duplexing and the need to reverse the paper flow is bound to cause some reduction in print speed, but here there's an obvious pause between the completion of the first side of each sheet and start of the second, one of the main factors in the slower throughput.

Duplex printing possible

Printed output from the C543DN is definite. Black text is sharp, crisp and jet black, and suffers very little from toner spatter or other unwanted artefacts. Colours for business graphics are bright and vivid, but this isn't always an advantage, as they can swamp the text designed to overlay them. Blues and greens tend to come out darker than their on-screen equivalents, though this can be compensated for, and there are some slight registration problems with black text over colour.

Our test photo print, always a challenge for colour laser printers, did well on the smoothness of colour changes and the detail in both well-lit and shadowed areas of the image. However, colours were again too bright for natural reproduction and there was some noticeable haloing around the edges of objects with a light background. A ridge of mountains against a blue sky, for example, produced a light blue fringe, that wasn't in the original image.

The optional tray coverts a single-sheet multi-purpose feed to 100 sheets

Lexmark quotes a noise level of 47dBA for the C543DN, which would be pretty quiet for a printing laser. In fact, we measured peaks, mainly when feeding paper, around 10dBA higher than this, which is quite noisy, but on a par with other machines of a similar type. As a workgroup printer, it would be better to have it on a printer stand or an unused desk than to lumber somebody with it as a network resource.

Verdict

The Lexmark C543DN is a solid laser printer for a small office or workgroup, with the advantage of duplex print to save paper. Its new colour laser engine works well, though colours can be over-saturated. Speeds are generally reasonable, but running costs are, for now, high. ®

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