Lexmark E460dw

Not a speed demon, but excellent quality



DESIGNED FOR SMALL and midsize businesses, the Lexmark E460dw is a high-volume monochrome laser printer offering wired and wireless connectivity as well as relatively fast printing speeds. Its compact size makes it a good fit for offices with limited workspace, but its $699 price tag is on the high side.

At 10.2x15.9x14.5 inches (HWD), the gray-and-beige E460dw doesn't require much space, though you'll want to leave a foot or so of clearance around the front and rear to allow for easy access to trays and covers. A printer control panel located on the upper-front edge consists of a group of three function buttons (Menu, Back, and Stop), a 3-inch (diagonal) gray-scale LCD, a four-way menu navigation button, and an alphanumeric keypad. Below the control panel is a multipurpose feeder door that accepts card stock, transparencies, envelopes, and other paper you would not ordinarily keep in a tray.

At the base is an adjustable 250-sheet paper tray that holds a variety of envelope and paper sizes (it handles sheets up to 8.5x14 inches). Lexmark sells optional 250- and 500-sheet drawers ($129 and $199, respectively) that attach to the base of the printer. At the top of the printer are a 150-sheet exit bin and a paper stop to help keep things neat.

At the rear of the printer are an 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi antenna, an Ethernet port, and the power switch, as well as an additional exit tray hidden behind a door. This model comes with a built-in duplexer for easy double-sided printing—a great way to save on paper costs and help the environment— and boasts a maximum duty cycle of up to 80,000 pages per month. It also ships with a high-yield (9,000-page) return-program toner cartridge. The return program offers special pricing ($192) for a replacement as long as you follow the free-shipping instructions to return the spent cartridge. Otherwise, you'll pay $229 for a new high-yield cartridge.

The E460dw's control-panel inter face has a vast menu list that is broken down into six submenus: Paper, Security, Reports, Settings, Network/Ports, and Help. The Security menu lets you create confidential print jobs with specific expiration times, restrict the number of failed user login attempts, and set up activity audit logs. In Reports, you can print out a list of available PCL and PostScript fonts, wired and wireless network information, and asset ID data such as model and serial numbers. Network/Ports is where you configure the printer for specific networking environments (it supports the AppleTalk, IPv6, LexLink, NetWare, Packet Burst, and SMTP protocols) as well as set up automatic emulation switching and change buffer-memory allocations. The others are pretty self-explanatory.

Installing the E460dw was quick and painless. Theincluded setup disc offers three installation choices: Local, Wired, and Wireless. We connected the printer to our host PC via the included USB cable, loaded the drivers, and were up and printing in less than 3 minutes. Configuring the E460dw for wireless printing was also a snap. Using the USB connection, we ran the wireless setup wizard, which displayed all available Wi-Fi networks in our range. After selecting our router's SSID, we were prompted to choose a wireless security protocol (WEP or WPA/WPA2) and enter its passphrase. Within 1 minute we had an IP address, and the E460dw was recognized as a network device.

After installing the printer drivers on each client, we were sharing the printer wirelessly among four systems. The E460dw is speedy, but in real world use you probably won't get near its claimed 40-page-per-minute rating. The printer needed 38.6 seconds to print our 10-page test document, which includes various font sizes and shadings as well as charts and photographs. While the printer was a bit slower than we expected, the text quality was outstanding. Even the smallest fonts were clear and well defined. The E460dw finished our 20-page plain-text document in 58.7 seconds, delivering the first page in just under 7 seconds. One of our main gripes with this printer is that it is loud, especially when it first initializes.



There is a Quiet mode setting that helps a bit, but the printer is still far from quiet when it's enabled. Chances are, most of the noise will be absorbed in a large office environment, but if you're using it in a small office, you may want to put it in a remote corner where it won't bother anyone. With its Draft N wireless capabilities, relatively fast printing speed, and crisp text reproduction, the Lexmark E460dw is a good choice for businesses seeking a solid workgroup printer that can handle high-volume printing. —John R. Delaney

Computer Shopper March 2009