Price range: £378.34
What is it: Colour laser multifunction printer
What we think: Producing fast, high-quality prints, it has a lot going for it
Lexmark X502n Review
Reviewed on: 9 July 2007
Image quality
Often, great speeds come at the expense of quality, but happily, this isn't the case with the Lexmark X502n. Its black text prints were basically perfect, which we would expect of a printer in this price range. Black graphics were also very good, marred only by faint horizontal lines. Colour text was nearly perfect, though very close inspection revealed some inconsistencies in character formation. Colour blending was very smooth, though.
The colour graphics print was a bit more problematic, but very good nevertheless. Colour blocks were nicely saturated, gradients were smooth (though we saw banding in the greyscale gradient), and the photo elements were sharp and detailed. Our only big problems with this print were that the colours were a bit too ruddy and it had some problems handling barcode-style patterns.
The X502n's Achilles' heel is greyscale scanning. It did a pretty good job handling various patterns, but the scan was very overblown, with a faded look to it. None of the blacks were remotely black, and details were shot in the highlighted areas of photo elements. But the X502n did a better job with the colour scan. Colours were smoothly rendered and pleasing and details were sharp. The only problem was, again, its inability to handle the closely set lines of barcode graphics.
Conclusion
Overall, we were very impressed by the X502n's quality. Only the HP Color LaserJet CM1017 did better, but that particular model sacrifices speed to quality and is better suited for workgroups that need very high quality graphics.
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Colour graphics | |
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Colour text | |
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Black graphics | |
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Black text | |
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Greyscale scan | |
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Colour scan | |
Edited by Matthew Elliott
Additional editing by Kate Macefield
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