Lexmark C530dn review

Lexmark's toner cartridge options are somewhat convoluted, but you do get plenty of choices. The C530dn ships with starter 1,500-page black and colour cartridges, while the C532n and C532dn models ship with 4,000-page black and 3,000-page colour cartridges. Replacing the cartridges is where your choices may become confusing. Lexmark has a return cartridge programme: it offers a price discount to consumers who agree to use the cartridge only once and return the spent cartridges to Lexmark for recycling or manufacturing. See the Lexmark site for more details. Cost-per-page varies greatly due to all the toner options, but overall, the prices are reasonable and in line with the competition. Naturally, the available high-yield cartridges result in a lower cost-per-page.

Performance
Among the colour laser printers we've seen in this price range, the Lexmark C530dn made an impressive showing. It was fast across the board and made high-quality prints. It printed black text at a speedy 17.02 pages per minute, behind the more expensive Oki C5500n (17.92ppm) and Lexmark's own C500n (19.86ppm). It was quick with black graphics prints, too: 16.36ppm, again, behind only the Oki and the Lexmark C500n. It really impressed us with its fast colour prints, though. Even printers that excel at mono prints usually slow right down with colour, but not so with the Lexmark C530dn. It cranked out colour text at 15.94ppm and colour graphics at 13.56ppm.

Colour laser speed tests (pages per minute)
(Longer bars indicate better performance)

Colour graphics

Colour text

Black graphics

Black text

Lexmark C500n

6.43 

6.88 

19.8 

19.86 

Oki C5500n

14.85 

11.37 

18.41 

17.92 

Lexmark C530dn

13.56 

15.94 

16.36 

17.02 

Oki C3400n

11.92 

8.38 

16.01 

15.55 

HP 2605dn

6 

6.75 

9.04 

9 

Sometimes, you get fast prints at the expense of quality, but the C530dn delivered in both areas. The black text was clean, sharp and dark -- everything we expect from a laser printer. The same goes for the colour text. Even better, the colour text suffered only minimally from the cross-hatching that often plagues colour text. The black graphics print showed excellent greyscale handling, sharp details and again, minimal cross-hatching. The colour graphics print also showed sharp detail and smooth colour gradients, though we saw some banding in what should be a smooth greyscale. The colours were also overly red, resulting in a ruddy skin tone among other things, but that was the only issue we found with the print.

Overall, we preferred the Lexmark C530dn's print quality to both the HP 2605dn and the Oki C3400n and found it to be on par with the more expensive Oki C5500n.

Edited by Matthew Elliott
Additional editing by Nick Hide