Lexmark C736DN Review June 27, 2011 11:53 by Matt Bird

Overview

The Lexmark C736dn is a good all round performer. It proves itself to be an exceptional colour laser printer for the medium to larger workgroup. It is speedy and economical to run and has expansion options to suit the most demanding workloads. Print quality is impressive and printing from a USB drive – PDF and graphic files – coupled with its PIN-based security system make it an outstanding printer in its class. The drawbacks we came up with for this model were minor. Well worth consideration.

Ratings

Lexmark C736dn

Main Review

The Lexmark C736dn is an impressively substantial duplex colour laser, which offers very high capacity for the business user with a larger workgroup. It’s a business-like grey and cream tower-shaped machine, with its laser engine mounted vertically, which makes it stand tall, even without any of the three, optional extra trays, each which hold a full ream of paper, like the built-in paper tray. Combined with the further option of a 2,000-sheet bin, this gives the C736dn a maximum capacity of 4,300 sheets. There is a square well in the top of the machine to catch printed pages and a front panel with a four-line, 16-character, backlit LCD display and navigation buttons alongside, plus a number pad to enable security protection via PIN. A front socket for a USB drive is also provided. We found the initial setup quite a performance, with protective strips to remove from individual toner cartridges and photoconductors, plus more strips on feed mechanism and print engine. The software setup is simpler, with easy to install drivers for PCL6 and Postscript Level 3 in emulation. Drivers for Windows 2000 onwards, OSX, Linux variants, Novell NetWare and Sun, HP and IBM versions of UNIX are all available, too. Although speeds do not reach Lexmark’s claims, this new model features an instant-on fuser, so it starts print jobs very fast. Over a 20-page black text document it achieved 25.5ppm and the text was of very high quality. The duplex version of the same document yielded 18spm – an impressive speed. A five-page black text and colour graphic document came out at 16.7ppm. Colour graphics are good overall, with bold, dense colours, although we saw slight problems with registration on black text over colour. Photo prints exhibited similar up-to-the-mark bright colours, with great detail even in shadowed areas – very good for a laser printer. The C736dn prints at its maximum resolution of 1,200dpi in its standard setting, so there is no fiddling around to get ‘best’ quality prints. Lexmark offers four options on their toner cartridges: standard and high-yield capacities in Return Programme (cheaper, as long as you recycle the cartridges) and non-Return versions. The photoconductor drums and waste toner container also have to be changed now and then. Taking these costs into account gives an ISO black text cost of 1.2p per page and a colour cost of 10.6p, using Lexmark consumables from Stinky Ink. Both these costs are very reasonable, with the black page cost being particularly strong.