Lexmark E350d

The Lexmark E350d is a big brother to the E120n in all the ways that count. It's bigger, faster, and trades built-in network connectivity for a duplexer to support double-sided printing. At an MSRP of $350, with street prices for less than $300, it's also double the price of the E120n. Let's see what doubling-up might do for an interested buyer.

The big block format in silver and grey lives on in the Lexmark E350d.

The 350d offers output speeds of up to 35-ppm single-sided, and 16 sheets per minute double-sided, making it the fastest of the printers in this group, aside from the $1,900 GCC Elite XL40. It comes equipped with 32 MB of RAM, expandable to 160 MB by adding a 128 MB DIMM to the single-open memory slot. It offers oodles of paper capacity, with a built-in 250-sheet output tray, and optional 250- and 550-sheet drawers. Though the network interface is dropped for a duplexer in this model, Lexmark offers optional Fast Ethernet, Wireless 802.11g and Gigabit Ethernet interfaces for this printer. Networked models of this printer include the E352dn, which includes 10/100 Ethernet via RJ-45 for about $100 more.

The E350d ships with a 1,500-page yield starter cartridge, and both 3,500 page-yield standard and 9,000 page yield cartridges are available for this unit. On the return program, the smaller cartridge costs $96, and the larger one $176; sans return, those prices are $120 and $201. This produces per-page-costs of 2.74 cents and 1.95 cents, versus 3.42 and 2.23 cents. Replacing the photoconductor every 30,000 pages is also recommended; it costs $37.50 and adds 0.125 cents per page to overall costs.