Comparative Test nine Low Cost Colorlasers: DC-Comment
Short-winded Lexmark C500n
A pretty good idea: Roll out a low cost color laserprinter and speed it up to more than 32 ppm. Promote it for small business, where prudent tradesmen expect high performance, and that´s fast (and low cost) printout.
And advertise this product verbatim: "The Lexmark C500 allows you to print complex color jobs quickly with speeds of 31 ppm in monochrome, 8 ppm in color..."
Our lab finds out, it is even more than 31 ppm, great!
Surprise, surprise
But if you copy more than 33 pages in B/W, you are in for a big surprise: Lexmark´s C500n takes a break, about a minute. And the printer does this approximately every 33 pages, if you have to copy 110 pages, add three minutes for breaks to your actual printing time.
And no surprise now: The printers performance printing colored text is slowed down as well, taking breaks for "warming up" (says the display), which actually are cooling down breaks to calm the overstrained fuser unit.
Bottom line
In monochrome copy-mode the Lexmark puts out approximately 15 pages per minute, when printing larger tasks, not 31 ppm.
HP Color Laserjet 2700 comes out ahead
Something new in our lab: The manufacturers´data about printing speed are way below our test results. HP claims for their 2700 a monochrome copy-speed of up to 20 ppm and 15 ppm in color.
Our test-results: Speedy 29 ppm in monochrome, more than 17 ppm in color.
Achim Lachner, Category Manager Hewlett-Packard, says: "The printer in your test could be a single device with unadjusted firmware. This could explain the high test results, which you find in the HP Colorlaserjet 3000-series."
DC can only speculate as well: The Color Laserjet 2700 has the same print engine the Color Laserjet 3000 is delivered with, tested by DC, and this one has the output we found in HP´s 2700. If you buy one, you might get a slower worker.
But even then the Color Laserjet 2700 is a bargain, it is at least one third cheaper than the 3000.
