Labs

Lexmark's black and silver styling manages to make the printer look bold without being garish. It's quite big for a black-and-white laser printer - and rather noisy. It emits a whiny, high-pitched huffing noise that will be difficult to ignore, particularly if you're in an enclosed space.

For such a relatively high price, we're disappointed that the Lexmark has no network port in addition to both its USB 2 and parallel ports. If you want to add one, it's a pricey option. Another criticism is the collection of hieroglyphic style status lights - it's almost impossible to guess what they might mean without referring to the instruction manual every time you use the printer. However, we did like the manual paper feeder at the front which is useful for printing with the occasional

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letterhead.

In our text test, the first sheet appeared in nine seconds, followed by prints at a rate of 23 pages per minute (ppm) - both the best we saw, but just under the quoted 26ppm. Quality was flawless - the Lexmark will endear itself to small businesses printing their own promotional material.

However, the photos in our newsletter turned out too dark with a great deal of detail being lost in darker areas. Grain and banding weren't distracting but were noticeable throughout the page. Too many dark areas were reproduced as uniform black, meaning that some graphs were practically unreadable.

These problems carried over into the photograph test. Although it remained easily possible to tell what the picture was of, it was too dark and too much detail was rendered black in dark areas. Running costs were acceptable, at 2.4p per page for a standard toner cartridge and 1.6p per page for a high capacity cartridge.

We were surprised to see that the maximum number of pages the E330 is recommended to print in a month - 15,000 - is the same as for the Konica 1350W (p83). If you're a business this could be a problem. Considering that the Oki (p86) is less expensive and cheaper to run and that the Brother (p82) offers quality plus a network port, the only reason for buying the Lexmark is its speed. It's just not worth the extra cash.