D. Matheny
After recently picking up the Lexmark MS810dn printer for our office, I have to admit that Ive been looking at Lexmark printers first since they really seem to be the best office printers Ive been able to find. Even though the CS310dn didnt really live up to expectations, I decided to try again with this MX410de as a multi-purpose unit for the front of our store. That turned out to be another winner! After using it for a while, here are the things we like about it: - The print quality is excellent! - Its reasonably fast. Nothing like the MS810dn; but, it blows the CS310dn out of the water since we dont have to deal with the constant cool-down cycles. - The printer duplexing works well - which is very important for us since we print so many federal documents that are required to be double sided. - It has a duplexer on the scanner as well - which is also important to us. - It was easy to set it up to scan directly to a network drive. That makes it a good choice for users to scan documents using whatever settings they need and then they can grab them from the network drive. (Otherwise we would need a dedicated scanner at every desk.) - It has an excellent touch-screen, which makes it very easy to configure in general. The controls are intuitive and easy to navigate. - Scanner and copier settings are easily configurable directly from the unit (mostly because of the touch-screen controls). Settings like duplexing, scaling, etc... are all easily available. - The scan & copy quality is also very good. - I like that the output tray is accessible from the front of the printer instead of out the back like the CS310dn. - I will never buy another printer that doesnt plug directly into the network - and the network support on all these Lexmark printers is excellent! - Of all the Lexmark printers weve owned, this is the quietest. The CS301dn was pretty loud in general, and the MS810dn has a slight buzz before it goes into standby - but this printer just sits there quietly. Even though this has been an excellent purchase, there are some issues that you should be aware of: - The duplex scanner feature actually passes the scanned item through twice instead of scanning both sides on a single pass - it then passes it through a third time so it will wind up in the correct orientation in the output tray. That makes it impossible to scan documents with attachments - or thicker attachments that wont go through the duplexer multiple times. (Maybe Im just spoiled by the Fujitsu fi-6130Z sheet-fed scanners that we also use.) - I wish Lexmark would make a single driver package that would work for all of their printers. It seems ridiculous that we have to download and install a separate driver package for every one of these printers; although, in the long run it probably isnt a huge deal. Overall, I would highly recommend this printer if youre working in a low-volume environment! The small paper tray, lack of flexibility in the input trays, and slower print speed (compared to the high end models) all contribute to making this a low-volume printer/scanner; but, it is excellent if you need an all-in-one printer to act as a secondary unit in your business. I suspect this would be an absolutely perfect printer in most SOHO environments!
