Lexmark E250 Toner Cartridges

Lexmark E250 Printer Review

The Lexmark E250 is a monochrome laser printer designed for the home or small office user. It has excellent print quality and a nice set of power and toner saving features, but its print speeds are slower and Lexmark toner can be expensive.

The design of the E250 has a small footprint and is fairly lightweight. The printer measures 10.2 inches by 14.1 inches by 15.6 inches (HWD) and weighs around 25 pounds including the toner cartridge. It will fit into some relatively small spaces and can be easily moved around, an attractive aspect for home users especially. Input paper capacity is 250 sheets in the main drawer. There is also a single-sheet manual slot for other types of media. Using the manual slot utilizes a rear exit door in the back of the printer, meaning the back of the printer will need to be kept accessible. This may be a problem if space is tight. If more paper capacity is needed, an additional 550-sheet drawer can be added, bringing the total paper capacity to an impressive 800 sheets.

The Lexmark E250 is fairly well powered. It includes a 366 MHz processor and 32 MB of RAM. This should be enough processing power to ensure that even a small office of shared users won't have to rely on host computers to do the processing for print jobs. The RAM can be expanded to a maximum of 96 MB if needs change in the future.

Print quality is excellent. Text is especially impressive, with dark, sharp, and detailed characters that are readable even at the smallest of font sizes. Graphics quality is a little better than average for a laser printer, with very little banding in gradients. Unfortunately, print speed is very uneven. Text tends to print slower than competing products, at around 11 pages per minute, while graphics prints are faster than the competition, at around 20 pages per minute.

Overall, the Lexmark E250 is a solid laser printer that is an excellent fit for a home or small office. Slow print speeds and expensive toner costs are the only major concerns.