Lexmark C748de

The Lexmark C748de ($1,199 direct) provides decent speed and voluminous standard and optional paper capacity as a color laser printer for a small office or workgroup. Its output quality, though a bit below par, was still good enough for internal business use.?

The C748de is a towering gray-and-white machine that measures 17.9 by 17.1 by 15.7 inches (HWD) and weighs 56 pounds?moving it into place is a two-person job. Set in the front bezel is a 4.3-inch color touch screen, which lets you preview documents and print jobs, access shortcuts and pre-loaded Lexmark solutions. Not far from the touch screen is an alphanumeric keypad. A front USB port lets you print from a thumb drive.

The C748de has a standard paper capacity of 650 sheets, split between a 550-sheet tray and a 100-sheet multipurpose feeder. You can add an optional 2,000-sheet tray plus additional 550-sheet trays to bring the maximum paper capacity to 4,300 sheets. This printer comes standard with an automatic duplexer for printing on both sides of a sheet of paper.

It provides USB and Ethernet connectivity; I tested it over an Ethernet connection with a computer running Windows Vista.

Print Speed

I timed the C748de on our business applications suite (using QualityLogic's hardware and software) at an effective 7.1 pages per minute (ppm). That?s in line with its rated speed of 35 ppm for both color and monochrome printing, and should be about the speed you?d get if you were to print text only. (Our suite consists of pages of text, pages with graphics, and ones with mixed elements.) Its tested speed was identical to that of the OKI C711dn ($1,139 direct, 4 stars), rated at up to 34 pages per minute for monochrome printing, 32 for color. We clocked the Editors? Choice Xerox Phaser 6280DN ($649 direct, 4 stars) at 4.5 ppm when we tested it in 2009.

Output Quality
Output quality for the C748de was slightly sub-par overall for a color laser, with sub-par text, graphics quality on the low side of average, and average photo quality. Fortunately, even sub-par text quality is fine for internal business use; I?d draw the line at resumes, marketing materials, or other documents with which you intend to convey an air of professionalism.

As for graphics, for the most part colors were rich and well saturated. Some graphics showed banding, a regular pattern of faint stripes of discoloration. The C748de had trouble printing very thin, colored lines. Most illustrations showed dithering in the form of visible dot patterns. Graphics were of a quality suitable for in-house use; whether they?re good enough for PowerPoint presentations depends on your intended audience and how picky you are.

For photos, generally color looked fairly accurate. Prints showed detail well in darker areas, though brighter areas tended to look washed out. Dithering was a significant issue. One print showed traces of banding.? Photo quality was fine for printing out recognizable images from files or Web pages; whether you?d use it for client newsletters with color photos depends on how picky you are.

Other Issues

Lexmark claims reasonably low running costs of 1.8 cents per monochrome page and 9.8 cents per color page. These are better than the Xerox 6280dn (2.7 per monochrome page and 13.8 cents per color page). Still, the LED-based OKI C711dn?s running costs were even lower than that of the C748de, with 1.1 cents per monochrome page and 7.9 cents per color page.

The C748de provides high-volume color printing for a small office or workgroup. The OKI C711dn is similar in price and provides an identical (100,000-page) maximum duty cycle and the same tested speed as the Lexmark, similar output quality and standard paper capacity. The C748de offers a copious optional paper capacity to a maximum of 4,300 sheets, more than double that of the OKI C711dn. The OKI C711dn, however, offers lower running costs, which can lead to considerable cost savings in the long run, particularly because if you?re getting a printer like this, you?re bound to be printing in volume.

The Editors? Choice Xerox Phaser 6280dn is slower than the C748 and has lower paper capacity and higher running costs. The Xerox?s forte, though, is output quality, which is easily good enough for printing marketing materials. If high-quality color output is paramount, the Xerox 6280dn can?t be beat.? It?s being discontinued, and as of this writing can be bought from a number of etailers for less than $350.

The Lexmark C748de offers decent speed, fairly low running costs, and exceptional paper capacity. It?s worthy of consideration for a high print volume office that can make do with output quality that?s slightly below the curve.

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