Once you've wrestled the Lexmark out of the box, setup is relatively simple. The printer ships with its four slab-shaped toner cartridges, sized somewhere between hardcover books and VHS tapes, installed; you must open the front panel, remove a piece of foam packing, then remove, pull some packing material from, and reinsert each cartridge in the stack. Next, you close the front and open the top to unwrap and insert the photodeveloper unit, which drops into place vertically.

As long as you have to take them out anyway, we're not sure we see the point of shipping the cartridges inside the printer: We were mildly uneasy to find some spilled toner inside our test unit, either from jostling during shipment or possibly a previous reviewer. Some paper towels took care of the smudges, although we had to take everything out and clean more thoroughly, focusing on the delicate and well-hidden printhead lens, when we saw vertical stripes or defects in our first printouts.

Like many of its competitors, alas, Lexmark earns a sincere jeer for shipping the C510n with penny-pinching, half-full starter cartridges, so buyers will get only 1,500 pages before having to shell out for replacements. Regular cyan, magenta, and yellow toners ($99 each) are rated for 3,000 pages and the regular black toner ($99) for 5,000; more frugal investors can get high-yield toner cartridges rated for 6,600 pages for cyan, magenta, and yellow ($176 each) and 10,000 for black ($125).

Other maintenance items include the photodeveloper cartridge, whose estimated life is 10,000 color pages (40,000 images) before you'll need a $212 replacement; the waste toner bottle ($6), which needs to be disposed of and replaced every 3,000 pages; and the fuser unit, rated for some 51,000 pages ($230). Adding and multiplying all of the above gives us a slapdash estimate of 12 cents per page for color printing, which is a bit more costly than some competitors, but not the worst.

For more precise cost estimates, one cool, nerdy feature accessible from the front-panel LCD menu is a coverage-estimate mode: Before you print a zillion copies of a given job, you can print one that appears with toner-coverage numbers superimposed on each page, so instead of using the generic cartridge-life guess of 5 percent, you'll know that a particular page has, say, less than 2 percent coverage of cyan, 3 percent each of magenta and black, and 6 percent of yellow.

Color-conscious print shops will appreciate that Lexmark provides software drivers with both PostScript 3 and PCL 6 emulation with automatic or manual (display or vivid sRGB) color handling. Its watermark and N-up printing options are merely adequate, but networked offices will be delighted by its job-handling options -- including, given sufficient printer memory, the ability to delay a job until the operator physically reaches the C510n to push a control-panel button (or, for confidential jobs, a specified passcode sequence of buttons), and to await a proofreader's OK between printing the first copy of a job and the rest.

Immediate Gratification

We've already mentioned its 30-ppm gallop through black text, but the C510n also beat the other color lasers we've tried in most of our (USB- rather than network-interfaced) stopwatch tests, although it didn't match the Hardware Central speed records held by the solid-ink Xerox. For example, our one-page Word business letter with spot-color letterhead logo appeared in a prompt 20 seconds, half the time of HP's Color LaserJet 1500.

Six full-page PowerPoint slides with white backgrounds took 1 minute and 5 seconds, though a similar sextet with solid dark backgrounds took more than three times as long (3 minutes and 32 seconds, trailing the Samsung CLP-500 as well as the Phaser). Our 55-page Adobe Acrobat manual, however, was ready in under 9 minutes, and 8 by 10-inch digital-camera prints averaged only 47 seconds each.

A few solid-color areas showed traces of banding, but not obviously or obnoxiously so, and photo images -- Lexmark boasts that it's tweaked its 600-dpi engine for "2,400 Image Quality" -- were sharp and bright. Text, as mentioned, was both truly black and easily readable down to 5 (well, 6) points.

Should you check out the C510n? Definitely. Its shallow paper tray, noisy fan, and extra penny or two per page initially swayed us toward giving the Lexmark a merely laudable four-star rather than one of our rare five-star reviews, but its speed, quality, and Ethernet interface for the price of some rivals' single-user models tip it into five-star territory.

Pros:

• Faster and more affordable than other network-ready color laser printers
• Great print quality; neat software-driver and job-control features

Cons:

• Skimpy 250-sheet paper tray; second drawer and duplexer are pricey
• Heavy and somewhat noisy

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