Lexmark’s Laser Printer

A small laser printer, the Optra E312L is very simple to setup, and can be connected to your computer either through a parallel port or USB. It comes with an exhaustive manual that takes you through the setup and has troubleshooting sections as well. The printer can accept 150 sheets of paper in its tray for automatic feeding, and also includes another tray for manual input. By default, the printer has 4 MB onboard memory, but this can be expanded to 68 MB using flash memory cards. It comes with drivers for Windows 9x, NT, 2000, and AIX.

Lexmark claims the printer speed is up to 10 ppm; we got about the same–9 ppm–in our tests. It supports three resolutions of 300, 600 and 1200 dpi. We tried changing the resolution but found that its speed remained more or less constant, which is good. The quality of the text prints is also very good, being readable right down to 4 pt font size. It did pretty well in our quality tests, too, producing smooth and sharp line art and curves. We also printed monochrome images and fountain fills (a smooth gradient of gray, which a good printer should reproduce on paper without banding) to check for quality. Here, too, it gave good quality prints without any visible banding.

At Rs 19,995 plus sales tax, the printer is a worthwhile deal, considering its performance.

Anuj Jain at PCQ Labs