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Lexmark C736dn workgroup colour laser printer

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Review If you’re running a large workgroup, you need a printer that is fast, cheap to run and has enough flexibility to handle a variety of media and to grow with the tasks it’s asked to perform. Endeavouring to address all these needs, while also offering colour, duplex and walk-up direct print, is Lexmark’s C736dn.

Fully loaded: Lexmark’s C736dn workgroup colour laser printer

For a large workgroup laser, Lexmark’s C736dn is surprisingly discreet. It has a smaller Desktop footprint than many, because its colour laser engine is vertically mounted, with each of the four, colour drum and toner combinations placed one above the other. It also has a main paper tray, which can take 550 sheets of office paper at a time, lifting it still further off the Desktop. A pull-down, multipurpose tray offers space for 100 sheets of special media.

Yet this is just the start of the printer‘s paper handling capabilities. You can add three more 550-sheet trays and a 2,000-sheet motorised bin, giving a total expanded capacity of 4,300 sheets, with plenty of flexibility for letterheads and follow-on sheets, as well as plain pages. Oddly, there are no equivalent expansion options for output, such as stackers, collators or staplers.

The printer‘s two-tone grey case isn’t particularly photogenic, but should fit in most modern offices, without glaring. Paper feeds out from front to back and a single, flip-up paper stop at the rear is all that’s needed to capture printed jobs. The control panel is functional and well laid out, with a four-line by 16-character, backlit LCD display also capable of full bitmap display, which is used to good effect by Lexmark in displaying help messages diagrammatically, for tasks such as correcting paper jams.

To the right of the LCD are menu navigation buttons and a complete number pad for entering PINs, when Printing securely. You can send a job to the C736dn, but delay print until a PIN has been entered from the pad, or control use of the front panel USB port with a passcode. The ability to print PDF and some graphics file types and to connect a digital Camera for PictBridge download of photos is convenient, but to avoid misuse, it’s good to be able to track it back to particular users via their PINs.

Easy physical access to USB print, but PIN protected

At the back are sockets for USB 2 and fast Ethernet and the printer comes with support for Windows from 2000 onwards and in both 64-bit and 32-bit versions. There are also drivers for OS 9 and OS X and support for Novell, UNIX, Citrix MetaFrame and Linux. Lexmark quotes versions of Linpus, Red Hat, SUSE, Linspire, Debian, Red Flag and Ubuntu – so better than coverage than many.

Physical installation is fiddly, as the machine uses separate drum units and toner cartridges and each has to be prepared separately, though they’re supplied in situ. There are also some spacers and protective papers to remove, and while none of this is particularly awkward, the cartridge approach is a lot easier. Software installation is straightforward and includes Lexmark’s MarkVision, a helpful network-capable monitoring applet.

A tall case, but unprepossessing looks

The speed of a workgroup printer is one of the key elements you pay for and Lexmark quotes 33ppm for both black and colour print. Yet again, the quoted speed is for an optimal print job, in draft mode and excluding page preparation time. Even the recently released ISO standard for print speed testing hasn’t corrected this continuing bit of hype. Quoted print speeds are still typically engine throughput speeds, which don’t represent the real-life performance you’re likely to see.

Starting with a five-page text print, we saw a time of 19 seconds from clicking OK in the Print dialogue to the final page arriving in the output tray. This equates to an effective print speed of 15.8ppm, less than half the quoted speed. Printing a 20-page document increased the speed, but still only to 25.5ppm. While we may whinge about exaggerated speed claims, a print speed of 25.5ppm is adequate for most workgroups and, even with a long document, you won’t be waiting long at the water cooler while it prints.

The C736dn has a duplexer built in and it’s a particularly efficient device in the way it performs double-sided Printing. It takes in sheets two at a time and prints the first sides of each, before Printing the second sides. The same 20-page document, printed as a 10-page, 20-side job, took 1:06. This is equivalent to 18.2spm, which is nearly three quarters of the simplex speed, unusually high.

Text print quality is very good, with clean, densely black characters showing no signs of jaggedness or toner spatter. We wouldn’t really expect to see any irregularities in the character shapes, given the default resolution of the machine is a high 1200dpi.

Consumables are accessible, but there are a lot of them

Colour print is bright and attention grabbing, though some colours are brighter than they should be. While this has little effect on business graphics, where you’re dealing mainly in primaries and with a limited colour range, it does mean that photo reproduction is slightly gaudy, with a cast to the red end of the spectrum. There’s also a slight mis-registration of blue and black, though neither this nor the brightness of the colour is a deal-breaker for most business uses.

Stocking consumables for the C736dn is made more awkward by its component design. There are separate toner cartridges for each colour and each of these is available in capacities of 8,000 and 12,000 pages black and 6,000 and 10,000 pages for each of the colours.

A surprisingly small footprint for a workgroup colour laser

They are also available in return programme – where you agree to send the empties back to Lexmark – or non-return programme versions. The return programme cartridges are cheaper as an incentive and we’ve priced the high yield versions, which give even better economy. The drums are available singly or in a four-pack and again we’ve used the four-pack pricing, as it works out cheaper. If you only print occasional colour, though, the black drum is likely to need replacing separately. Finally, there’s a waste toner bottle.

Adding this lot up and doing the maths gives a cost per page of 1.15p for black and 8.42p for colour. These costs are both reasonable for this class of machine.

Verdict

This is a robust, workgroup workhorse, with plenty of room for expansion. It’s fast, even in duplex mode, and the print quality is more than adequate for general business use. PIN-protected, walk-up Printing is a useful bonus and the machine is widely compatible with a range of operating systems, but maintenance is more fiddly than it should be.

Expandable print capacity with good duplex speed and secure, front-panel Printing.

Suggested Price: £735

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