The Lexmark C544dn is one of the newest in a long line of impressive color laser printers from Lexmark. A little too large to serve as a truly personal printer, it's aimed at a small office, workgroup, or busy home office, with ample paper handling, reasonably fast speed, and fairly high-quality output.
The C544dn's paper handling is one of its strongest points. The standard 250-sheet drawer, one-page manual feed, and duplexer for printing on both sides of a page should be enough for most small offices. If you need more, however, you can boost the capacity to 900 sheets with an option that adds a 550-sheet drawer and 100-page multipurpose tray.
If you don't need a duplexer, you can get the C544n instead of the C544dn, but if there's any possibility that you might ever want to duplex the extra $50 for the C544dn is well spent, since Lexmark offers the same paper tray options for both models, but no duplexer for the C544n. Lexmark says that the two printers are otherwise identical, so most of the comments in this review apply to both. Lexmark also sells a wireless version, the C544dw, which is essentially the dn model with 802.11n Wi-Fi added.
The printer is relatively small for a color laser, at 11.5 by 16.7 by 15.7 inches (HWD), and relatively light, at 46.2 pounds, so it's easier to move into place than most of its competition. On the other hand, there's more work than usual involved in removing the packing materials. You have to remove a side panel, remove the toner cartridges, and then put everything back together. None of this is hard, but it involves more steps than most printers require.
The C544dn can be installed for a (wired!) network on a Windows XP system, but according to Lexmark, it also comes with drivers for Vista, Windows 2000, Server 2003, Server 2008, Mac OS 10.2 and higher, and Linux. In addition, you can download drivers from Lexmark's Web site for Windows 95, 98, ME, and NT; Mac OS 9.2 and above; and several flavors of Unix.
Features
Printer Category: Laser
Type: Printer Only
Color or Monochrome: 1-pass color
Laser Type: Laser
Connection Type: USB, Ethernet
Maximum Standard Paper Size: Legal
Number of Cartridges: 4
Number of Ink Colors: 4
Direct Printing from Cameras: Yes
Duty Cycle: 55000 pages per month
Input Capacity: 250 sheets
Network-Ready: Yes
Duplexing: Yes
Cost Per Page (Mono): 2.4 cents
Cost Per Page (Color): 12.8 cents
Printer Consumables for the Lexmark C544dn:
We are proud to feature all the toner cartridges needed for the best prints possible at the lowest prices by using the C5222KS-10 black compatible toner cartridge as well as the C5222YS-10 Yellow Toner, C5222MS-10 Magenta Toner and C5222CS-10 Cyan Toner. In case you rather print with OEM Original Lexmark C5220KS-OEM you can also find very low prices.
