Lexmark C544dn

Lexmark 544DN is excellent for a small office, fast and quiet.

This printer is quiet and fast. Excellent for a small office. Changing paper sizes is a pain as you have to extend the back of the closed paper tray. This could have been engineered better.Outside of the paper tray problem I am very pleased with the quality and performance.

Best color laser for the price

First a disclaimer. I have 25 years experience supporting various hardware and software, so minor technical issues that put other users off are usually easy for me to resolve.

I selected this printer specifically to replace my 8 year old every-day medium duty Monochrome laser, a Samsung 2151n that had begun to error out on the occasional print job. I also had a large color mailing for my business coming up and thought I might save some money and time instead of dealing with a four year old inkjet that usually gets that job. The target was better than 20 PPM, network and duplexing with very good color graphic output, good durability, medium duty, and less than $600.00 for the printer and a full set of high yield toner cartridges. There aren't a lot of printers that meet all of those criteria. HP's are too slow and expensive, and everything else in the price range has crappy color output.

Windows support, speed, networking, quality, and duplexing were all flawless. The one issue I have is the output tray is not well designed. In order to run a substantial sized duplex job, you will have to close the output tray guide and put a box behind the printer to catch sheets as they are pushed over the edge or just stand next to the darn thing and pick them up hot out of the output feeder. Otherwise, we got output jams after fifteen pages or less once it got warm (paper sticks together easier). Better paper might put that number higher, but right around 25 sheets using the built in output tray guide and the collected output paper obstructs the output feeder entirely.

One note on OS support. We use Ubuntu Linux extensively here and I went through the process of obtaining the manufacturer provided PPD files and installing them. This turned out to be a bad idea as the Lexmark provided PPD under CUPS slowed color printing to a crawl compared to native Ubuntu Foomatic PPD which runs at near Windows speed.

Overall, this printer is an excellent combination of features and capabilities for the price. The output tray sucks if you have any major work to do on it.

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Very Tempermental Printer

I've had this printer for six months and am punting it. The set up was quite simple, and the print quality is fine, when it works. It is incredibly slow and seems to have a mind of its own regarding when it will grant my wish to produce a document. Today it just stopped working altogether and beeps but otherwise is dead. The troubleshooting guide says a service call is required when this happens. I'm just cutting my losses and moving on. Stay away from this dud.

Worst printer ever

Every time I print on this printer, the pages get scrunched up and the pages are out of order. When new pages are printed, they push against the previously printed pages, sometimes going under them, sometimes going over them, sometimes pushing the previous pages so they flip over, and often scrunching up the pages. I end up having to spend a lot of time manually sorting the pages. My work place got this printer as a replacement, since the previous printer usually had a paper jam a couple of times for each print job. I wish we could go back!!

Excellent except for Setup

I would love to give this a 5-star review from the start, but because of the setup and early operation problems I had I just can't. I do wonder if some of the problems might be attributed to Amazon--no proof of that!--but I do suspect I got a slightly used printer, perhaps one of those returned by the dismayed fellow reviewing below.

First problem out of the box: No printer cable. All documentation in their manual say a cable should have been included. But the cable from my inkjet worked on it, a standard printer cable, so that wasn't a big problem for me.

Setup was easy, following along their included instructions. I did wonder at the amount of toner powder inside the printer at various points (one thing that made me think it might have been a bit used). All set up, with printer drivers installed and... nothing. Didn't work.

Call to tech support, about a 10 minute wait time. Be prepared for a tech support call--get a flashlight, screwdriver (Phillips), lens cleaning cloth, paper towels, a flat clean surface to place big components, and magnifying glass or reading glasses if needed for close, small, fine work.

The first problem, the total non-op, was fixed by removing a back plate and reseating some cables. Then it printed. Second problem was "voids" in the black portion of the printing (color was fine). These were invisible lines running the full length of the page. Online help suggestions first recommendation was a new toner cartridge. Well, I wasn't going to waste a full, very expensive toner cartridge, so was able to reformat my (rush) print job to get around the voids and did a huge print job. After that, with the new toner cartridge not fixing the problem, another session with tech support had me take the printer apart again and clean a glass strip which had gobs of toner obscuring it.

Super! Now the printer reaches the 5-star portion of its review.

With everything working as it ought, this printer is dazzlingly, deliciously fast. Color and/or black and white, the pages fly out. I did a two-sided 900 page print job in a matter of hours. That's about 3600 printed sheets. When asked how long this would have taken with the inkjet, I answered, "Does that include the five trips to Walmart to get more ink cartridges?"

And the quality is stunning. The colors are gorgeously saturated, the lines sharp. None of the wet ink or moisture problems of an inkjet. The pages look fabulous.

The black toner cartridge that comes with the printer printed well past its maximum total number of pages. The second black toner cartridge started to say "low" _before_ it's maximum number of pages. One downside--once it says a cartridge is "low", do not shut the printer off! It printed perfectly for hundreds of pages after it said it was low, but shutting it off overnight apparently sent it to "empty" and it refused to print any more.

The duplexer... it's fast. It works well. It never jammed. But, oh my goodness, what a mess it made spewing papers all over the place. If you have any duplex job over 10 pages or so, especially if you want it collated, you're better off doing one side at at time, flipping them and sending them back through for side two. The output pages stay reasonably neat on single-sided but are a mess duplexed.

Only about 100 pages at a time in the standard paper tray. I'm uncertain of the larger paper tray because of the mess it would make in the output tray. More than 50 or so sheets in the output tray and they start falling on the floor.

This printer is said to be an "Energy Star" printer. That's just funny. My office lights dim when this power sponge prints.

So, a three-star review for a five-star printer that I (now) love.

**Added the additional memory--easy to do, took off the same back plate (6 screws) I had to take off to reseat the cables to make it work in the first place. Stick the memory in. Printer recognized it immediately. Here's the odd part, though, it seems *slower* with the added memory! Printing is just as fast but the wait time until the printing starts seems a bit longer. I have not tried a huge, complex print job yet, however, so that may be where the added memory pays off. BIG CATCH: The added memory for this printer from any "official" source was about $600. We paid $30 for the same new memory card. Shop around and don't overpay!

**Added the large second paper tray. So far so good. Installation is nothing--just set the printer on top of the added paper tray. A couple experiments on the computer with tray selection and it worked perfectly.

Arrived today

Set up was a snap.... ethernet cable power cable and that was it.
Instruction to unpackage was clear and easy todo. Make sure the ink carthridges are seated in place.
Hooked up to a MacPro OS10.6.4
Open up Print/Fax Preferences and add printer... that's it!

dual sided printing , althought slower than single page printing was very good. I printed a two sided document with 100% ink coverage and it took aprox 35 seconds.

Color is proof quality.

Graphic Designer

Good quality printer

Very pleased with the printer. It's a little noisy but I understand there is an option to actually decrease noise level. Quality on documents, in color and in black and white, is excellent. I am having a slight problem with photos but they have sent me a replacement part. Lexmark customer service/ technical support has been stellar. I made a simple mistake at home in hook up and they worked with me extensively until we figured it out. Overall, a great deal for the money and I like their "green" environmental recycling policy as well.

Awesome printer

OK. It's true--there are cheaper and faster printers out there. But, when you factor in the toner costs over a few years and a few thousand pages, along with the time you'll spend fighting with the other printers and their issues (don't think I've forgiven you, HP!), this printer wins. It took 15 minutes from the printer's arrival on my doorstep to the first pages being printed, and that was mostly because I wanted to finish my lunch first. This printer does everything that the old one was supposed to and a little more. It's quick enough, it's quiet enough, it's incredibly easy to set up, the size and form factor are nice and it just works. Thank you Lexmark, and thank you Amazon.

One thing I particularly like is that the toner cartridges are nice and compact, with way less cartridge and way less packaging to recycle.

Tough luck

After three attempts at receiving a machine that both worked properly and was complete, I gave up on Amazon/Lexmark and purchased a Dell 3130cn. It works fine but needs pricey accessories to be comparable.

Printer performance is AWFUL

This is the slowest color laser I have ever seen. The first out page in either 1200 or 4800 is multiple minutes for even a text page. I am using a MAC so perhaps its the driver. I had bought this as a backup to my Dell 3100 (which has a first out page which is really quick, but duplexing speed is slower) and now it will sit as a piece of heavy furniture.

Do not spend the money for this DOG