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Lexmark E260DN networked mono laser printer
Not as fast as claimed
There are two key factors all printers are measured on: print quality and print price. The E260DN produces high quality black print. Text is clean, almost like dry print, and densely black. The printer's default resolution is 1200dpi, but even when you switch to draft mode you get 600dpi, which is more than adequate for internal documents and could be set as the default by many folk.
Greyscale graphics are also reproduced better than average, with good differentiation between different colour equivalents. There's some slight banding in large areas of greyscale fill, but generally graphic output is more than acceptable.
Not as fast as claimed
When you get to photographic output - never a particular strong point of a mono laser, to be fair - there’s some irregularity across the sky of our test print and some shadow detail has merged to black, but foreground detail is good and reproduction is generally reasonable.
Running costs come down to the 3500-page toner cartridge, which at internet prices comes in at around £85. The drum unit, which is good for 30,000 pages, will set you back around £32. Doing the maths gives a cost per page of 2.6p. Compared with other mono lasers in the same price bracket, this is on the high side. For comparison, the £170 OKI B410d has a page cost of around 1.7p and the £175 Kyocera Mita FS-1300D will cost you just over 1p per page, using the same calculation parameters.
If you can find consumables cheaper than we found, your costs will go drop accordingly, of course, but you're unlikely to get down to the levels of these rival printers. And if you buy consumables at the 'official' price, your running costs will be even higher.
Verdict
This is a good, general-purpose mono laser printer, with surprisingly fast duplex and a useful draft print mode. It's not as quick as Lexmark would have you believe, but still has a decent turn of speed. Running costs, while not as good as some of its competition, are not excessive. ®
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