Lexmark X204n

Handling

The Lexmark X204n is a black-and-white multifunction laser printer that includes a fax machine. 

The manufacturer is relying on some pretty traditional features to win consumers over: as well as being particularly affordable for an all-in-one laser, the X204n is billed as a fast, reliable printer which produces good quality documents.  It also offers network connectivity, although not with WiFi, and double-sided printing, but this is manual rather than automatic.

It supports PCL5e, PCL6 and PS 3 and comes with drivers for Windows and Linux.  It has 64 MB of memory.

It has two paper inputs: one main tray and a sheet feeder, each of which can hold 250 pages; it can store up 150 printed pages.

Speeds

Lexmark might have claimed speeds of 23 pages per minute, but we only managed to reach 8 ppm in normal mode!  That's quite odd, as we nearly always manage to equal the speeds quoted by manufacturers for their laser printers.  In this case, Lexmark has borrowed a strategy that's bad enough with inkjet printers, tweaking the settings to ramp up the printing speed to unrealistic levels that are totally unrepresentative of ordinary usage.

In practice, we could only get to 23 ppm by removing greyscale from our test documents, which of course has a negative impact on quality.  It's acceptable for text, but any illustrations or graphics will take a hit.

Printing Quality

The tech specs given for this product on Lexmark's website are quite odd.  Instead of a single maximum resolution, the following values are given: '1200 Image Quality, 1200 x 1200 dpi, 2400 Image Quality, 600 x 600 dpi'.  Elsewhere, only one of these appears, 1200 x 1200 dpi, and it's cited as one of the printer's main strengths.  How odd: the manufacturer gives three different resolutions, but only one of them can be right.  So is this a 600, a 1200 or a 2400 dpi printer?

Well, here's what it looks like compared to a real 1200 dpi from Lexmark: Face-Off: X204n vs X544dn.

It's pretty clear from these tests that the X204n prints much more like a 600 dpi printer.  The output is much less accurate than what you'd get from a 1200 dpi printer.  We suspect that the unusual specs mean that the actual resolution is 600 x 600 dpi, but that Lexmark has included some other modes that it thinks can boost the quality to levels equivalent to 1200 or even 2400 dpi printers.  We're not convinced.

Noise and energy consumption

Printing speeds and quality were both disappointing compared to what's published in the specs, but we were pleasantly surprised by how quiet this printer was, producing only 56 dB of noise.

It's also pretty efficient for a laser print on standby, requiring only 9 W.

We had a problem when it came to testing its energy consumption while printing, and can't give you a result.  Lexmark's site claims that the printer uses '3.33 KWh per week'.  That's a very unusual way of presenting this data, but if you divide that by seven days, you get 475 W, which is an entirely normal score for a printer of this standard.


Cost per page

As is often the case, you don't get a full range of consumables, but a 'starter' kit.  It can only manage 1500 pages, but its replacement offers 2500 pages.  You can buy two different versions of the toner, with or without Lexmark's Return Programme.  The latter is not only cheaper to buy, but also comes with an envelope to return the empty cartridge to Lexmark for recycling.

ISO Lifespan for text documents

Cartridge	Price	ISO Lifespan	Cost per page
X203A11G Lexmark Return Program	£79.90	2 500	3.2 p
Photoconductor kit	£62.25	25 000	0.2 p

That's a total cost per page of 3.4 p, which is a reasonable average for an entry-level printer.  More economical printers, like the Oki B440dn, can be more expensive to buy, but have running costs as low as 1p per page.