Lexmark X204N All-in-One Laser Printer

For nearly $300, the Lexmark X204n wasn't the fantastic printer I expected it to be. It did a fine job and produces extremely sharp printed pages. It's also very compact and easy to set up. But I found it rather slow for most print jobs (though certainly up-to-snuff for copying and scanning). So if your office has limited space, this could be the laser printer you've been waiting for; but if space is less of an issue than speed, you might take a look at some faster--and cheaper--competitors.

Printing nine pages of a PDF document took nearly 12 seconds per page, which is not exactly blazing fast for a laser printer. The sub-$200 Samsung CLP-315 took only 41 seconds to print a 12-page job--in color, while the Brother MFC-7840W prints at an average of four seconds per page. The Lexmark printer needed 42 seconds to print a two-page Word document, with 30 seconds for the first page out. Switching to Draft mode knocked a few seconds off the time. Still, I wasn't getting anywhere near the 24 pages per minute that Lexmark promised.

There were some paper-handling issues that left me less than satisfied. The 204n left cheap copy paper curled. And printed pages (at least letter-sized pages) don't come out of the printer very far--rather, their top edges just reach the edge of the printer, so you need to reach inside and pull out the collection of (curled) pages. While the lack of an external output tray keeps the printer's footprint small, when printing large jobs it looked as though the pages would eventually end up in the wrong order, or knocking previous pages out of the printer and onto the floor.

On the bright side, the output is excellent, with remarkably sharp text even on the cheap paper. The printer offers 1200x1200 dots per inch (dpi) resolution which helps explain why the output (even in Draft mode) looks so good. Scanning to a PDF was fast and easy (you can scan to a file or as an e-mail attachment). And the copier does a fine job with copies. The Lexmark 204n was also easy to set up, and even better, was installed without having to install a lot of unnecessary software packages.