New Laser Printer

My old HP DeskJet 970cxi died, so I decided to finally buy a color laser printer. Owning a color laser printer has been sort of a Holy Grail for me. I owned a black-and-white laser printer in 1994, and I always thought the true day of personal desktop publishing would arrive with reasonably priced color laser printers.

I bought a Lexmark C530dn at NewEgg.com for slightly more than $500 (when shipping is included). Since I bought the DeskJet several years ago for around $300, this new $500 printer seems the right price. There are cheaper color laser printers from Lexmark and Dell, but I wanted an integrated duplex unit. (I dislike wasting paper and I prefer to carry fewer sheets when possible.) The printer got outstanding CNet scores and I found the Better Buys for Business (.pdf) praise convincing.

After lugging the box upstairs (60+ lbs) it took about 15 minutes to set up the printer, install the software on Windows XPSP2 and attach the proper cables. I'm printing through the XP box, although the printer has an integrated Ethernet port if I wished to attach it to the network. Print quality (even in draft, which I made the default) thus far is excellent. The printer supports PCL 5c Emulation, PCL 6 Emulation, Personal Printer Data Stream (PPDS), PostScript 3 Emulation, and PDF 1.5, but I haven't tried printing to it from Unix yet.