Lexmark X466 Laser Printer

The Lexmark X466 monochrome laser printer is meant for businesses and for heavy-duty printing needs, and it doesn't come cheap (it's over $1,000). But for the price it's quite fast, networkable, can print up to 80,000 pages a month, and has built-in conveniences duplex printing. And, like some other new offerings from Lexmark, it has a large and customizable touchscreen that simplifies repetitive printing, scanning, and copying tasks. That alone may help many office managers choose this over similarly priced competitors.

Lexmark recently unveiled its newest line of Web-connected printers, and, though they're still in the first generation, it seems that these new printers will change our expectations of printers, scanners, and copiers. This Lexmark monochrome laser printer offers some of the same benefits--allowing different users to customize the touchscreen options for their particular needs--but for a corporate audience. The big question, though, is whether users will be ready to fork over $1,200 for that convenience--especially when other business-size laser printers (and even some color laser printers like the Samsung CLX-6200) are available for considerably less dough (this printer is much more compact than the Samsung, however).

The X466 is certainly fast. A seven-page PDF took only 17 seconds to print, with the first page taking almost half that time; a four-page Word document took only 10 seconds. Print quality was as should be expected from a laser printer: sharp and crisp. Likewise, scanning was fast and easy, though without a network connection I could only scan to a USB drive, which is certainly an inconvenience. However, since the printer is aimed at offices and will likely be networked, this may not be an issue for many.

The printer excels in offering some handy features such as authentication options (to lock some jobs out from unauthorized users) and handy options such as Print and Hold (so you can print a job once and make sure it looks right before committing the printer to printing multiple versions--this feature alone could have saved me many reams of paper). The options are simple to access and configure; Lexmark is taking a lead in making printers easy to configure and use, which comes as a relief to those who, like me, sometimes struggle trying to figure out how to use all the available features.

With a built-in 256 MB of memory, large jobs can be easily stored (and that memory is expandable to 640 MB). When I threw a huge printing job at the printer (a 134 MB PDF file), the printer took more than 10 minutes to get started as it prepared the job in the background--and then shot out duplex pages at lightning speed. That, admittedly, is probably 10 times bigger than the average large print job, but it's something to keep in mind.

The bottom line is whether you're ready to spend an extra $400-500 for the convenience of a large, programmable touchscreen on a relatively small laser printer. If so, you'll find the Lexmark X466 to be a useful addition to the office.

Disclosure: Review samples were provided by the manufacturer. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.