While not the fastest or least expensive printer in its class, the E310 excels on print quality and good driver support. The Lexmark Optra E310 is a monochrome laser printer designed with a home user or individual office user in mind. Its compact frame takes up relatively little space on a desk or shelf, though the unit is very tall, as the input and output trays are oriented vertically on the top of the printer. This won’t pose much of a problem for most users, but is worth mentioning if vertical space above the printer is restricted.
Print quality is excellent, with sharp text even in small fonts, and 600 x 600 dpi resolution. Quality is also helped by a feature of the drivers called “Postscript 2 emulation”. Postscript 2 is a language used to send information to the printer for printing, and is an improvement on the original Postscript version. With the emulated Postscript 2 included in the drivers, prints can have sharper quality, faster printing speed, and other improvements.
One criticism of this model is the small amount of RAM included. At just 4mb, users may need to upgrade it for more complex documents. When factoring the cost of the printer and the upgrade, it falls short of less expensive models with more memory.
Printing speed is fair, at 8 pages per minute, but this falls behind many other printers in its price range. Printing costs are average for its class, and with a 5000 page toner cartridge included, light users may get a lot of mileage before having to replace it.
Overall, the E310 is a good choice if quality is important, especially if the features of Postscript 2 are necessary. However, there are less expensive printers on the market with more speed and comparable print quality.
