Printers

Lexmark E320 Monochrome Laser Printer

Rating:

By Joel Shore

Monochrome laser printers are amazing. When the first desktop model appeared in the 1980s, it delivered a mere 300 dots per inch resolution and was priced at more than $3,500. And you couldn’t download fonts to its meager amount of internal memory. You used what was built in. If you didn’t like it, well, tough.

We’ve come a long way. Lexmark’s $300 E320 prints at 600 x 600 dots per inch (dpi), four times the resolution. And it’s capable of quality equivalent to 1200 dpi. Here’s a great printer for home or dorm room, when razor-sharp text is valued above all else.

Easy setup. There’s no big deal to hooking up the E320. You have a choice: parallel or universal serial bus (USB) ports. If you are replacing an existing printer that uses the parallel port, you’ll have a cable at hand. If not, go with USB. It’s quick and uses a thin cable.

Keeping costs down. So why are some laser printers so expensive? Easy. Other laser printers, especially those designed for large businesses, have costly extra features, like 2,000-sheet paper trays, the ability to be managed over a network by an administrator miles away, and a monthly duty cycle of up to 200,000 pages. They also have powerful processors and print engines that can spit out as many as 40 pages a minute. Personal-use printers don’t need any of that. But they do have something in common with their industrial-strength counterparts: superb-looking output—and that’s what really counts.

Hands-on testing. We printed several kinds of documents, mainly as a check for print quality. After all, that’s really the only thing that matters. From Microsoft Excel, we printed a spreadsheet that had cells shaded. Both the shading and the very fine grid lines printed sharply with no broken lines. Our word-processing document from Corel WordPerfect printed equally well. Finally, we printed a couple of high-resolution color photos. They were all right, but they didn’t have quite the snap that a true 1200 x 1200 dpi printer would have. We didn’t mind, because this isn’t a printer you buy for printing photos in the first place.

We really like the Lexmark E320 (and its network-ready twin, the E322). If you use this product mainly for text-based reports containing occasional graphics, you’ll get great results. Save that expensive ink in your inkjet printer for those photos.<