Lexmark T420 Toner Cartridges

Lexmark T420 Printer Review

Fast printing speed and an affordable price may not be enough to counter the poor print quality. The Lexmark T420d is a monochrome laser printer aimed at budget-conscious offices. Its affordable price is the main draw, coming in well below printers with similar speeds and features.

At 16 pages per minute, it comes in faster than most competing products, especially at its price range. Print quality is the main drawback here, as its quality is well below competing products, even at its lower price point. Text printing is sometimes uneven, showing spots and blocks of ink in places. Graphics print too lightly, with banding present in some prints. Small fonts are particularly poor, showing broken text, especially in italicized text.

The controls on the printer are particularly sparse, with only a "Continue" and a "Cancel" button on the front panel. This may be enough for some users, but for users used to a screen on their printer, this may be an issue. With only two buttons and some blinking lights, error codes become difficult to decipher and troubleshooting can become a nightmare.

The capacity of the printer is good, with a 250 sheet input tray and an optional 500 sheet add-on available. The output tray only holds 150 sheets, however, which could be a problem for larger offices with multiple users printing to the same machine.

The unit ships with a 5000 page toner cartridge, with high-yield cartridges available with a capacity of 10,000 pages. This lowers the cost per page to around 2 cents, which is very good for this price point. Utilizing the toner saving features of the driver will help cut costs even more, but given the print quality issues already apparent for this printer, this may cause quality to drop to an unusable level for some uses.

Overall, the Lexmark T420d is a solid contender for small or large offices, but lackluster print quality makes it difficult to recommend for situations where quality is a priority.