Lexmark C540n

bad printer

I was looking for a color peinter that is easy to use for home use, but this is not a good one.

Avoid this printer!

I bought the printer about 2 and a half weeks ago. Set it up and printed on regular paper with no issue. (However, it sounded like a jet engine taking off so its claim to being quiet on another site is a joke.) Last night I tried to print on labels. I'm a 'techie' so doing this should be pretty easy, correct? Not on your life.

I changed the media setting to labels which is what is necessary on printers, especially laser. (Ever print on cardstock when the setting is for paper?? Try it and you'll see what I'm talking about.) Anyway it appeared as if the job was going through. Then the red blinking light came on. Knowing technology the way I do I knew this wasn't good. So I went to the printer and I had to input what type of printing I wanted to do: manual, automatic, etc.. I chose automatic and everything printed out fine. Until I went to print out the next sheet of labels. It did the same thing again. Getting rather agitated I looked on their site for help and didn't find much. I then called their support number. Somebody with a very thick accent answered. It was very hard to understand him. I walked him through my situation. He had me go to the printer and change the media type on the printer itself. I did that (it didn't work). I asked him if I would have to change the media type on the printer each and every time I changed the media. He said yes. Huh? Why would I have to change it on the printer if I'm already telling it the type of media through the software? I told him this was ridiculous and we hung up.

I'm not a novice when it comes to printers. Over the last 15 years I have owned about 20 printers. Four of them were laser. I've even taken apart a laser to fix it. Having to go to the hardware each time I want to tell it to do something rather than through the software doesn't make sense. It's also a waste of time and energy.

I read in another user's review about the issues with Vista. A light bulb went off. I'm using this on a laptop that is running Vista. While I understand lots of OLDER printers have clashes with Vista this is a brand new model. Vista shouldn't give it problems.

I'm returning it tomorrow and getting a Brother. I've had two Brother laser printers and both of them can simply be plugged into a Vista machine and print away!

Excellent color laser but it'll cost you a fortune in toner

This is by far the best printer I have owned. For a color laser it is small and convenient. Setup was very easy including installing it on our home network. I also like the toner tanks instead of the usual roller tanks. It is also comparatively lightweight compared to some of the monster size color lasers available. I choose color laser to avoid the inkjet rip-offs. Print quality is excellent for both color and text, the unit is quiet and comletely silent in standby. There's an eco mode meaning it uses almost no power in standby-mode (about 14W). It works great with both XP and Vista.

--------------Update - 8 months of use -------------------
The print quality is exellent but the toner cost will ruin you. We have printed about 1,100 pages and already used up the toner that came with the unit and one set of new toners with 2,500 page capacity. Obviously the toners won't give you 2,500 pages - my guess is that our's has given us about 600 or so. Most of what we print is text so I will assume our usage pattern is average. Cost per page including cost of hardware runs close to 75c per b/w page. The reason: I just emptied the waste toner - It was full so be warned - that is where your toner goes!

Vista driver and status monitor need a lot of work

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).