High-quality, low-priced workgroup and small-office color printers are becoming commonplace, but that's no excuse to become complacent about them. We confess we've seen so many under-$1,000 color lasers at the Labs, Weather, & Sports Desk lately that our last couple of reviews snubbed the four-pass or rotary technology that created the category: The HP Color LaserJet 3500 uses a fancier single-pass engine, instead of sending each page on four trips through the printer to apply cyan, magenta, yellow, and black toner, and the solid-ink Xerox Phaser 8400 isn't a laser at all.

But though it prints color pages at only a fraction of the speed of plain text -- it's rated at 30 pages per minute in monochrome and 8 ppm in color -- the Lexmark C510n shows there's plenty of life left in old-school, four-pass technology.

For one thing, it's cheap enough to let Lexmark assign the magic $999 price tag to the fully office-ready network model, with 128MB of onboard memory and both 10/100Mbps Ethernet and USB 2.0 ports, instead of the stripped-down personal version with just 64MB, USB, and parallel (that's the C510, at $699).

For another, a four-pass design is a great choice if you expect to spend a good chunk of the Lexmark's 35,000-page monthly duty cycle on bread-and-butter, black-and-white text jobs: The C510n cranked out our 20-page Microsoft Word test document in a sizzling 53 seconds, thoroughly competitive with monochrome laser printers and anywhere from 40 seconds to over a minute quicker than any color competitor we've tested.

And the C510n's output looks great -- maybe a fraction shy of the Phaser 8400's glossy tones for PowerPoint slides or Excel charts, and ditto versus a much slower, top-quality inkjet for photo images, but with crisp black text, bright colors, and eye-pleasing quality on every page. Like its rivals, the Lexmark will get somewhat less economical if you order a few options or indulge its appetite for color consumables, but it's worth a look from any color printer shopper.

Not Quite As Loud as a Hair Dryer

Also like its rivals, the C510n is too ponderous for one person to move easily -- it weighs 67 pounds, though its 19.5 by 16.5-inch footprint is small enough that you might be tempted to find room for it on your desk instead of down the hall. We'd advise against that, unfortunately, because it's too loud to keep near your phone -- the thumps and bumps of the engine during printing aren't that bad, but the steady whir of its cooling fan passes the threshold from white noise to annoyance, at least until its power-saver shutoff (after 15 minutes' inactivity by default, though you can specify a shorter interval).

Similarly, the C510n and C510 models stand just over 15 inches high, though if they were slightly taller you wouldn't need to refill them as often -- the pull-out paper drawer in the printer's base holds just 250 letter-sized sheets instead of a full 500-sheet ream. Paper travels upward through the printer to exit face down on top; you can pull up a plastic flap to prop up output for easier removal and another to stop legal sheets from sliding too far and falling off.

A deluxe model C510dtn ($1,999) has both a second, 530-sheet drawer beneath the main tray and an automatic duplexer for double-sided printing; the two options are available separately for $399 and $599, respectively, while a legal-sized replacement for the 250-sheet letter tray is $129. Lexmark also offers an external 802.11b wireless network adapter for $199.

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