Lexmark X522 Toner Cartridges

Lexmark X522 Printer Review

The Lexmark X522 laser printer is a multifunction device aimed at the small or medium office environment. Its fast speeds and excellent feature set are impressive, but its very high price tag will likely turn away offices on a budget. In that case, an HP printer with HP Q7553X toner.

The design of the Lexmark X522 laser printer is straightforward, with the printing unit on the bottom and the scanning and copying unit on the top. The machine can print, scan, copy, and fax, covering virtually every task an office would need. It also has some nice bonus features, such as one-pass duplex scanning, which scans both sides of a page in a single pass, unlike most machines, which must do it in two passes. This can save a lot of time. It also has built-in networking support, allowing it to connect directly to a network for sharing among multiple users.

Unfortunately, along with its many features comes a hefty price tag that will likely turn away small offices on a budget. Only an office with a large budget and high-volume needs could justify its high price. However, for small offices or personal use, perhaps the Brother TN350 toner printer will be better.

Economical toner costs do help its case somewhat, however, as the Lexmark X522 toner cartridges are very affordably-priced. Moreover, each laser toner cartridge has a capacity of 20,000 pages, so the per-page cost is very low. A toner save mode can also help get more from each printer toner cartridge. While the unit might reduce operating costs, it is hard to imagine it can make up the difference from its high upfront price.

Printing and scanning quality are both excellent. Text is very sharp and dark, and readable at very small font sizes. Graphics and photo quality is also very good. However, for color graphics, a good alternative would be a Phaser 6360 which uses seperate cartridges of Xerox 106R01218 toner.

Overall, the Lexmark X522's many excellent features and benefits are greatly outweighed by its high price. Small office users will not likely have the budget for such an expensive machine.