Lexmark X500n

The Lexmark X502n is a behemoth of a printer. It measures 21 inches tall, 19 inches wide, and 17.2 inches deep, and weighs a hefty 77 pounds. Its possible to move it yourself (speaking from experience) but not recommended, for fear of dropping the printer and breaking both it and your toes. The multifunction unit that sits atop the printer comprises a flatbed scanner, an automatic document feeder, and the control panel.

The flatbed scanner is only big enough to scan A4 or letter size originals, but using the ADF, you can scan legal size documents, too. The ADF can hold up to 35 pages.

The X502n comes with a 250 sheet input tray that can be configured to hold up to legal size paper. An optional 530 page drawer is available, too. Unfortunately, theres no manual feed slot, so one off prints still have to go through the main drawer.

The output well, located below the control panel, can hold up to 250 sheets. The control panel is basic and well organized.

Three buttons let you switch between copy, scan, and fax tasks. For faxing, theres an alphanumeric keypad, 10 one touch dial buttons (and a shift key, for a total of 20 one touch numbers), and redial, hook, and directory buttons. The standard reduce or enlarge, lighter and darker, image quality, menu navigation keys, and start and cancel buttons are all present and accounted for.

Finally, the control panel includes a backlit, two line text LCD for perusing menus. The X500n uses four toner cartridges black, cyan, magenta, and yellow. Each cartridge is offered in regular and high capacity versions. The regular black costs $90 and yields about 2,500 prints, while the high capacity version costs $134.70 and yields about 5,000 pages.

Each regular color cartridge costs $98.45 and produces about 1,500 pages, while the high capacity versions cost $119.70 apiece and yield about 3,000 pages. Using the high capacity cartridges for best value, we estimate that a black print will cost about 2.7 cents per page, while a full color page will cost about 14.7 cents per page. Both costs are low.

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