Lexmark X342n Toner Cartridges

Lexmark X342n Printer Review

The Lexmark X342N is a high-capacity multi-function monochrome toner cartridge laser printer, designed to be a jack of all trades for small office or home use. It includes print, copy, scan, and fax functions, most of which can be accessed from the front panel without the need for a PC. The printer also includes an ethernet port, allowing it to be connected directly to a network for printer sharing, again not requiring a PC connection. A great color printer to compliment the X342N is the Lexmark C534 toner printer.

Many home users considering this printer might be turned off by the lack of color printing and the high price when compared to multifunction inkjet printers. However, the tradeoff is more efficient printing at lower operating costs than inkjets. At 18 pages per minute, speeds are faster than inkjets, and the included ethernet port is not a common option for inkjet multifunction machines, which typically only offer USB connections.

The X342N model is a higher-capacity version of the x340n model. It is identical in features, but uses higher capacity Lexmark toner cartridges which result in lower per page costs. The X342N model comes with a 6,000-page cartridge, compared to a 2,500-page cartridge for the X340N model. Given that the cartridges are not interchangeable between models, buyers should consider whether they need the extra capacity before choosing a model, as they will not be able to upgrade to the higher capacity cartridges later.

Print quality is excellent, with especially sharp text. As with many printers, very small fonts show some blurriness and artifacts. Speed is average for a laser printer, but the multifunction features more than make up for this. It is also worth noting that the Lexmark X342N comes with Presto! Pagemanager 7.0 Deluxe software, which allows you to easily convert documents to PDF format. ABBYY software is also included for optical character recognition, allowing you to convert scanned documents to text, which can then be copied, edited, and searched. When combined with the automatic document feeder, this allows offices to quickly and easily convert large amounts of paper documents to digital format.