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Provides: Color laser printing, copying, scanning

Developer: Lexmark International, Inc.

Minimum Requirements: Mac OS X, USB port or Ethernet port for connectivity

Retail Price: $499.99

Availability: Out now

Leave it to Lexmark to bring you something like this. The company that manufactures and sells inkjet printers at such an inexpensive price that they may as well just give the printer away with the purchase of an ink cartridge has now introduced the X500n. Coming in at less than $500, the X500n offers color laser printing, scanning and copying with touch-button simplicity, and throws in ethernet because...well, why not?

But the trouble with the Lexmark inkjet all-in-ones (AIOs) is that they ended up being jacks of all trades, masters of none. The printing was usually fine, and the copying was okay, but the scanning was rudimentary. With X500n color laser printer, the printing is excellent, the copying is excellent, and the scanning is, unfortunately, rudimentary.

Before we get to that, though, let's talk set up. The first think you'll notice about the X500n is that it's big. Really big. At 21" high, 19" wide and 17.2" deep, this is easily the dominant laser printer in my office (along with an old HP 4050N and an Oki C5300). It also weighs in at a hefty 77 lbs. Don't plan on moving this thing around too much.

Set up is a bit involved, but not much more complicated than setting up your standard Lexmark inkjet. By that, I mean that there's more to do (four toner cartridges to install, after all), but the directions to do it are basically as easy to follow. Most of the instructions are simple diagrams, and although I did at times have some trouble figuring out what part of the printer was being referenced, I had the printer unboxed, set up and attached to my computer in about fifteen minutes.

USB connection was as simple as plugging in the printer and turning it on. No additional software installation was required, so you can start printing almost right away. The ethernet set-up was also fairly straightforward, provided you've done that sort of thing before. Without too much effort, I was able to get the X500n on my office network, and was able to print to it from the both the Macs and the PCs.

The top unit (which is partly what makes the X500n seem so huge) contains the readout and function buttons, the scanner, and a document feeder for the copier. The feeder is a nice touch I wasn't expecting, and it actually makes the X500n a quite capable copier for small office and home purposes. The copier can handle right around 30 copies per minute, or about 15 copies per minute using the document feeder (letter sized paper, black/white copies). And, of course, the control panel allows you to make copies without having to deal with any software on the computer. These controls also allow you to shrink your documents to 25% of their original size, or blow them up to 400% (bearing in mind that your documents are restricted to 8-1/2" wide, as in letter or legal paper). You can easily copy two or four pages to one page, and you can have the printer collate your copies. Lexmark has the basics covered.

Scanning, however, isn't quite as functional. Although there is a scanning button on the printer, you can only make use of this if your X500n is connected to a network. If you're connected via USB, you'll have to use the Lexmark software or TWAIN-compliant software, such as Photoshop. And speaking of that, although I installed no software to get the Lexmark X500n running on my system, Photoshop instantly recognized the printer and added it to its File: Import option. Isn't technology wonderful?

The scanning bed itself is stuck at 8-1/2" x 11" or A4, but at least the bed is flat. This is a major improvement over some of Lexmark's all-in-one inkjet printers where the scanning is bed is at a slight angle, which often caused my document to slide out of position before I could get the cover closed. There are, of course, no transparency options here, and I found the scans to be only adequate. They're fine for basic office work, but photo scans leave a bit to be desired. To be fair, though, if you're looking to scan photos for graphics work, you shouldn't be looking at any all-in-one printer for your scanning needs.

Although scanning and copying features are handy to have, we buy printers to print. With a 366MHz processor of 128MB of non-upgradable RAM, the X500n can handle some decently sized print runs. However, it has an odd stuttering problem. While printing 300 copies of a single sided color PDF, the printer would pause every 10 to 15 pages to calibrate itself, according to the display. This wasn't a major problem; it only slowed down the print run a bit, and I'd rather the printer does what it must to keep the prints looking good and consistent.

And they do look good. The colors were vibrant and smooth, especially when utilizing coated laser printer paper (on standard paper, the prints had a slight ink-jet style look to them). And although the colors were fairly accurate, they did appear to be slightly oversaturated in some areas. In one of my test prints, the solid reds tended to stand out a bit too much from the colors around them. Still, for the price of this printer and the market at which it's aimed, the color quality exceeded my expectations (as did standard black text printing, for that matter). The speed was nice, too. Count on getting about 20 pages per minute (ppm) when printing black text, and about 7 ppm when printing color text and graphics.

A big drawback, though, is the prince of ink refills. Your looking at just shy of $100 each for the regular yield cyan, magenta and yellow cartridges (about 1,500 pages) or $120 for high yield (3,000 pages). Black ink will run $90 for regular yield (2,500) and about $135 for high yield (5,000) pages. This comes to just under 3 cents a page for black printing and under 15 cents a page for color. These costs are actually fairly low for the industry, but still something for which you want to be prepared.

Still, that Lexmark is offering at this price a networkable color laser printer with impressive copying and fairly decent scanning capabilities is really rather amazing. It's even more amazing when you consider how well the unit prints. In my test run, which involved many paper grades and weights and a lot of dual sided printing (you have to turn the paper over yourself, of course), the unit only jammed once. And even then, it may have been my fault as I kind of overfilled the paper tray. The provided tray holds only 250 sheets, but a 530 page drawer can be purchased separately.

It's size and weight and the ongoing costs of ink refills aside, the Lexmark X500n is an excellent option for home and small office users looking to finally ditch their inkjet printers and move up to the speed and quality of laser. Just make sure you have someone around to help you get it out of the box.