Oversize monochrome printers from HP, Lexmark, and Xerox prove practical yet pricey

Behind the front door lie separate tubes for the 30,000-page toner cartridge and the 60,000-page photoconductor, which have convenient handles and slide into place snugly. You can’t access the paper path through the front door; instead, all paper movement happens behind a door on the left side, which folds down with the duplexer to provide somewhat tight access to potential jam spots.

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Paper guides in the dual 500-sheet internal paper trays are easy to adjust and lock into place, but the trays themselves wiggle and don’t feel sturdy enough. A groove in the main output tray makes it easy to remove your prints, and an overflow sensor hovering over the tray stops the machine before the tray jams.

The W840dn’s control panel is where Lexmark’s designers put on their thinking caps. Its highlight is a USB port that reads flash drives and displays their folder structure on the LCD; any files in .pdf, .jpeg, or other non-proprietary formats show up so you can print them. Unfortunately, it can’t handle Word and Excel, calendars, and other proprietary formats. That’s not Lexmark’s fault, of course, but it sure would be convenient to print such files on the run.

Up, Down, Left, and Right arrows simplify moving through the menus, especially with a fifth button dedicated to accepting a menu choice (a useful feature missing from the HP and Xerox printers). It also has a numeric keypad, useful for entering an IP address or print-and-hold passwords. Lexmark’s menus include a set of help files that users can print for information on media types, refining print quality, and so on. As a sysadmin, you can also set how many times people can fish for a password and how long the printer stores print-and-hold jobs.

Still, the W840dn’s control panel has two minor annoyances. Its arrow buttons are wrapped around a conical bulge that interferes with pressing them, and the Cancel button is on the far side of the LCD, which leads to working the menus with both hands.

The W840’s internal Web page is somewhat less detailed than those in the HP and Xerox printers, but it does provide network settings, reports, and security controls. You can also lock the control panel menus. If you need more sophisticated features, especially for a fleet of printers, move up to Lexmark’s free MarkVision management tool.

Of the three printers I tested, the W840dn sped past the HP and Xerox on my text and Excel test documents. The Xerox beat it on my photos and PowerPoint tests, but of course I weighted text and spreadsheets much more heavily for monochrome printers (that accounts for the W840dn’s high Speed score). I must confess: I’m impressed by a printer that can print one copy of a plain text document at 34.1 ppm and accelerate to 47.7 ppm for 10 copies; cranking out Excel tables and charts at 41 ppm doesn’t hurt either.

The W840dn prints very black. Ordinary text and numbers look crisp and attractive, but I noticed a tendency to overshoot on very small letters and fine fonts, which degrades the quality a bit. The darkness spills into graphics, where, for example, pie chart wedges in several shades all look about the same; graduated gray shades also show some banding and blocky transitions, which might show up in your PowerPoint transparencies.

Lexmark charges $3,299 for the W840dn and equips it with 256MB of memory, double the competition’s. But Lexmark’s cost per page is about 1.3 cents, almost a third more than for the HP and Xerox. Still, after 250,000 prints (about five years’ worth in an average office), you’ll have spent only a modest $2,292 to keep your W840dn well fed.