Comments on: C543DN Color Laser Printer

By: J. Enterprises

J. Enterprises — Thu, 06 May 2010 09:25:54 +0000

I have had 2 HP all in one ink jets in the past and was ready for something different. I bought this printer from a retail store, the comparable HP was $100 more and was way slower first page out. I unpacked and lazily set it up in half an hour on a USB local set up. I have only printed a few pages and I am inpressed. Printing a paypal email notification invoice with small amounts of color and scattered text coverage, 14 seconds from mouse click to in my hand done. Thats pretty fast. I printed some graphics with a broad array of color, very clean resolution and professional look, less grainy than the HP2025DN test page in the store (an probably on crappier paper than in the store too..) So far I am happy with my purchase. I was afraid to try a new brand but I was pleasantly surprised.

The start-up manual is written in literally every language under the sun, all the info is on the disk which is fine. They forget to tell you the power switch is on the lower left of the case, no biggie. Unpacking is pretty easy, you have to take out all of the safety shipping lockout pieces and load it with paper. If you can carry it in the house you can set it up yourself, not terribly heavy. If it goes into power save mode you can press the cancel button to wake it up and have instant printing again. Super fast! I tried to pring in sleep mode once and it took 1 minute to calibrate and then print. I just bought a set of 4 of the HY (high Yield) 2500pg cartridges from amazon for $280 delivered. Basically, so far so good.
Rating: 5 / 5

By: Guy Bloomfield

Guy Bloomfield — Thu, 06 May 2010 08:38:53 +0000

I'm having a different experience than other posters. The color I'm getting from the machine is mediocre. I'm printing PowerPoint presentations and any solid lines come out spotty. A solid blue line starts out blue, turns to light blue, then sometimes turns back to dark. If I print the same page over the line looks different. Often times I see little horizontal lines through solid colors and frequently I see large vertical white lines that go though the whole page. This is on a 1 week old printer with toner that the web interface says is half full.

Jams are another problem. Duplex printing jams every single time, on every other page. Forget about it. At least they're real jams though, non-duplex printing often stalls telling me that there's a jam when there is not one. I open all the doors and covers and there is nothign there. I hti the little check button and it fires right back up.

I'm using this in an office with 7 people and the thing is a real pain in the neck. People have started walking down to kinko's rather than use this thing.
Rating: 2 / 5

By: Justin Bongard

Justin Bongard — Thu, 06 May 2010 06:37:29 +0000

+ I have never had a problem with this computer. I have not ever put it under a great load. I leave it turned off most of the time but I turn it on, and by the time I am ready to print a document, so is it. I don’t even see much of need to keep it in even power save mode (besides the Wake On Lan feature of course). It is so close to me so I am not bothered with that though.

+ I keep it plugged into my Wireless Draft 2.0 Router and have never had any connection problems. It is really easy to set up on Linux and Windows 7. The drivers were automatically installed on Windows and even updated when new ones were available. Linux (Ubuntu 9.04) didn’t even have to download drivers, it just worked the moment I confirmed with Linux that it was a Lexmark printer of a certain model. Adding a network printer on Windows 7 is as easy I could imagine it to be and Linux was not far behind.

+ It certainly is not a speed demon at printing either black or white but It prints out a very steady flow no matter if a page is color, black, or however complex (3-D Graphics and such do not print out slower than text. I love the duplex feature and it is adjustable for “Econo Mode” so you use up a little less toner on each.

+ It was pretty easy to set up physically. All the spacers and everything are all bright orange and pretty hard to miss. It took a little bit of figuring to see how to open and close areas of the printer but nothing too complicated for anyone to handle. Anyone would be able to figure it out eventually with just a little patience.

I love it, but don’t expect it to have the best pages per minute ever. Although, the cold-start and calibration I think is faster than average.
Rating: 5 / 5