lexmark e210? any good?

[brad]

I came across the lexmark e210 at a ridiculously low price and wonder
if its any good. My intended use is for children's school work and
occasionally printing a duplex item like a calendar or small booklet.
Is this suitable for this? The duplexing would be about 30 sheets 20
pound stock 8 1/2 by 11. I understand I would have to manually duplex
it. I was concerned about the reliability of the paper path etc.

Regards, Brad

[PianoMan]

Well I've had one for a couple months and haven't had any problems
with it. Of course I haven't tried duplexing either, but haven't had
any paper jams though, although I'm a light user.
Lexmark also has an XP driver on their site if you're running XP (I
am).
The printer comes with a "starter" toner cartridge good for 1000
sheets, and replacement drum/toner cartridges are $80.00, good for
2000 sheets I believe.
The output looks good at 600 dpi, and the printer seems fast, and
comes with USB (which I'm using), and parallel ports.
One of the PC sites compared this printer with the Samsung, and while
they liked the Lexmark, they liked being able to expand the RAM on the
Samsung (the Lexmark has 4 Meg non expandable, I think the Samsung can
be expanded to 8 Meg--somebody correct me?) and this site thought the
Samsung's per page cost was a little cheaper.
My thoughts are...with the rebate, I got my E210 for $99.00, and got
the $50.00 rebate very fast. Where else could I get a new 600 dpi
laser printer for under a hundred bucks?

>Al

[Hank Metz]

"PianoMan" <nal...@localnet.com> wrote in message news:dovafucvsmnk0jr91...@4ax.com...

All the above agreed with, here's a link to a toner article (a teaser):
http://www.rechargermag.com/article.asp?id=200205014
on the 210, in case you're thinking of diy on the cart.

I'm about to order a 210 kit from here:
http://www.tonerrefillkits.com/refill_products074.htm
Somebody stop me if you've got any bad news about them.

Hank Metz

[Michael]

Be careful if the school work, calendars or booklets are graphics intensive.
Although Lexmark advertises the printer as having 4MB, it actually only has
2MB. Print a self-test page. Also, it uses GDI so don't expect great
quality graphics.

For light usage, and mostly text, it would be a great printer. However, the
cost per page is a little high, so make sure you aren't saving a hundred or
two upfront only to spend it on toner cartridges.

Michael

"brad" <brad....@usa.xerox.com> wrote in message
news:5187b5db.02052...@posting.google.com...

[Hank Metz]

How is it that 4 MB becomes 2, is it a non-standard performance measure they employ to claim that?

Also, what is GDI?

Thank you for any pointers.
--

-Hank Metz

"Michael" <mic...@nospam.net> wrote in message news:siVJ8.10429$p15.45...@newssvr21.news.prodigy.com...

[Michael]

> How is it that 4 MB becomes 2, is it a non-standard performance measure
they employ to claim that?

Good question. I went to Staples to buy the printer based on the fact that
Lexmark claimed it had 4MB of RAM. However, when I bought it at Staples
they advertised it as 2MB and said that Lexmark had made a mistake. Staples
then printed a test page from the floor model (and I later did the same with
the one I purchased) and it only showed 2MB installed. I called Lexmark
and, at the time, they confirmed their mistake, and said only 2MB was
installed. Why they haven't fixed their website, I have no idea. However,
for graphics intensive documents, I run out of memory unless I switch to a
lower resolution. Based on my experience, I believe the self test.

> Also, what is GDI?

It is the language the printer uses to print, such as PCL (Page Control
Language or essentially the HP standard) or PostScript. GDI is cheap (no
license fees) and requires minimal printer hardware (cheap again). The
downside is that is uses your PC to "draw the page" before it sends it to
the printer. The result is a slower printer with sub-par graphics output.
Shading and gradients are particularly poor; with the gradients being
perhaps the worst I have even seen on a printer.

My opinion of the printer is that it is an excellent printer if you want to
print mostly/all text at normal or larger font sizes. If you want to print
out a lot of graphics, or do complicated page layouts, this printer isn't
the printer for you. But for $99-$149, the fact that this printer has
compromises shouldn't be a surprise. Lastly, the consumables are a little
expensive given their rated life.

Michael

[Hank Metz]

Thanks Michael, that clears up a lot of what I thought was my constructs using the 210 to print graphics. You're absolutely correct,
it works great at text, but so-so for anything else, still a pretty good bang for the buck in spite of that though.

--

-Hank Metz

"Michael" <mic...@nospam.net> wrote in message news:Y6VK8.18725$zb5.60...@newssvr21.news.prodigy.com...