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The Color Laser Printer Guide: Vendor & Product Profiles
Entire Contents © 2006 Prog
ressiv
e Business Publications. Copying of Pages Prohibited.To Order: 800 247 2185 or www.betterbuys.com 29
C770.
We calculate 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 famil
y is one of
the few tha
t prints
at letter/legal size that has an extended range of options,
including an envelope feeder, high-capacity feeder, finish-
er
, adequate output capacity, and a mailbox option. Most
competiti
ve models offer, for example, only 250 or 500
sheets of
output,
w
hereas 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,
K
y
ocer
a’
s FS-C8008 f
amily), but few letter or legal size
ones.
Le
xmark 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-
tuall
y identical sib
ling
,
y
et the mar
ket niches and prices
ar
e quite distinct.
Chart entries — pages 97–98
L
exmark 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:
● The C920 is the base version ($3,299).
● The C920n adds networking ($3,549).
● The C920dn adds duplexing ($3,749).
● The C920dtn inc
ludes automatic duplex,
a second
pa
per tr
ay, and netw
orking ($4,999).
All models in this family start with 256MB of memory,
w
hic
h can be upg
raded 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
m
ultipur
pose 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
thr
ough v
arious combina
tions 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 touc
h is the a
bility to print o
v
er
siz
e sheets
.
T
he 100-sheet m
ultipur
pose f
eeder can hold sheets tha
t
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-white cost 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
W
aste 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
TOTAL PER-PAGE COSTS
$ 0.0936 $ 0.0186
9.36 1.86
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