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The Color Laser Printer Guide: Vendor & Product Profiles

C770. Wecalculate it as around 1.9¢ per black-and-white

page, 9.4¢ for color.These prices are much more reason-

able than those of the C770 and are pretty good in terms

of the market.

Unlike the C770, the C772 series is in a specialized cat-

egory — there are a limited number of color laser print-

ers with extended options for output and input. In fact,

this color laser printer familyis one of the few that prints

at letter/legal size that has an extended range of options,

including an envelope feeder,high-capacity feeder, finish-

er,adequa te output capacity,and a mailbox option. Most

competitive models offer, for example, only 250 or 500

sheets of output, whereas the C772 models allow you to

stack thousands of sheets.

In spite of added capacity (and the otherwise solid fea-

tures it shares with the C770), the C772 family is quite

affordable. There are,of course, very good ledger-format

machines with excellent finishing options (for example,

Kyocera’sFS-C8008 family), but few letter or legal size

ones.

Lexmark has long been clever about getting an extra

bang from its development dollars. Here we have a print-

er family that is the higher-performance version of its vir-

tuallyidentical sibling,yet the market niches and prices

arequite distinct.

Chart entries — pages 97–98

Lexmark C920

Lexmark C920n

Lexmark C920dn

Lexmark C920dtn

32ppm full color

36ppm black & white

Sum-up: Lexmark’s powerful high-speed entry in the color

ledger-size printer market.

Lexmark touts the ledger-size C920’s “dynamic” LED

technology,claiming that it cures some of the registration

problems that previous generations of LED printers

encountered. In any case, we think it is a very good color

printer. It’s a faster version of the 28ppm C912, now dis-

continued.

The C920 series has speeds of 32ppm in color and

36ppm in black-and-white, and achieves this speed at an

interpolated resolution of 2,400dpi. We’ve come a long

way from just a few years ago, when 8ppm in color was

considered fast.

The C920 comes in four different flavors:

lThe C920 is the base version ($3,299).

lThe C920n adds networking ($3,549).

lThe C920dn adds duplexing ($3,749).

lThe C920dtn includes automatic duplex, a second

paper tray,and networking ($4,999).

All models in this family start with 256MB of memory,

whichcan be upgraded to 1GB. They use an extraordi-

narily powerful 1GHz processor and feature USB con-

nectivity and PostScript 3 support as standard. All but the

base model support standard Ethernet. An optional

40GB hard drive is also available.

The C920 family comes with a standard paper capacity

of 650 sheets in the base model, made up of a 100-sheet

multipurpose tray and a 550-sheet tray.The C920dtn, as

we have stated,comes with a second standard tray. Paper

capacity can be expanded to a whopping 5,300 sheets

through various combinations of options.On the output

side, 650 sheets come standard with all models, though

Lexmark also offers a 1,000-sheet-capacity finisher. The

finisher performs single-position stapling of up to 30

sheets and has optional 3/4-hole punch.

One nice touch is the ability to print oversize sheets.

The 100-sheet multipurpose feeder can hold sheets that

are up to 12.5" x 36".

An optional feature you may want to add is Lexmark’s

Lexmark C772

Consumables costs at-a-glance

Price

Yield

Full-color cost per page

Black-and-whitecost per page

Black print cartridge $170.00 15,000 $ 0.011 $ 0.011

Cyan print cartridge $374.00 15,000 $ 0.025 N/A

Magenta print cartridge $374.00 15,000 $ 0.025 N/A

Yellow print cartridge $374.00 15,000 $ 0.025 N/A

Waste toner bottle/black $13.00 150,000 $ 0.000 $ 0.000

Waste toner bottle/3-color $13.00 50,000 $ 0.000 N/A

Maintenance kit $582.00 120,000 $ 0.005 $ 0.005

Fuser kit $343.00 150,000 $ 0.002 $ 0.002

TOTALPER-PAGECOSTS

$0.0936 $ 0.0186

9.36 1.86

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