Printing power to a point

When I first plugged in the Lexmark C520, it sounded like a rocket ship getting ready to blast off into space.

However, the technology inside the covers of the sleek-looking printer wasn’t quite as advanced as a rocket (and maybe that’s a good thing since parts tend to fly off rocket ships at an alarming rate these days).

This colour laser printer is pretty good about spitting out Word documents and PDFs faster than you can get up from your desk to pick them up, but is a little slower when it comes to printing out PowerPoint presentations.

I recently reviewed a C520, and the first challenge was setting up the printer. This wasn’t time consuming or difficult, but it was a bit tiresome as the instructions on how to install the printer were black and white drawing with red arrows that supposedly point the way. However, all the drawings did was create confusion and make them look a lot more complicated than it actually was. It’s the type of badly-constructed instruction manual that always makes me want to run away from the task.

Blast off
I decided to put the instructions aside and see if I could figure it out for myself. There were a number of pieces of plastic packaging material in the printer — what appeared to be a superfluous amount and every time I thought I’d removed them all, the printer would tell me otherwise. Once all of the packing material was removed, I turned it on, and, as I said, it sounded as though it was ready for blast off.

I connected it to my computer, put in the disk to install the driver and was up and running in no time. Word documents came sailing out of my printer, as did PDFs.

According to the specs of the C520 and its sister printer, the C522, it prints at up to 20 ppm and is as fast as 13 seconds to the first page. But such measures are generally meaningless to me — all I need to know is that I won’t have to wait around for the printer to get the pages out. By the time I walk over from my desk to the printer, I want the page to be there or at least to be printing. There’s no problem in this regard when it comes to Word documents and PDFs.

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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