The C500n has a simple top-mounted control panel. It consists of a Start/Go button, a Cancel button, and four buttons for navigating the short menu: Left/Right, Back, and Select. A two-line monochrome LCD shows you the menu options, which are limited to basic configuration options and test/calibration options. Unfortunately, the LCD isn't backlit, making it difficult to see in low light.
If you do a lot of black printing, this might be the printer for you. The Lexmark C500n was a speed demon when printing black text and graphics: 19.86ppm and 19.80ppm, respectively. It slowed down a good deal when dealing with color, but it's still on a par with or better than the competition: 6.43ppm for color graphics and 6.88ppm for color text. Lexmark's own C522n proved faster at graphics prints than the C500n. The print quality of the C500n was also quite good. It excelled at printing black graphics: the text was clean and crisp. The black graphics prints were also good, with decent detail in the image portions and a good handling of the grayscale. We liked the color text handling, too, though in smaller point sizes, we could see visible dots and cross-hatching. Color graphics is where the C500n fared the worst, and it actually wasn't all that bad. We saw visible banding in the grayscale and some jaggedness on curved lines. Color graphics looked decent, though we did see a bit of banding in the color gradients. In the photo elements, skin tones looked believable, though slightly ruddy.
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
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Color graphics | |
Color text | |
Black graphics | |
Black text |
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
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Color graphics | |
Color text | |
Black graphics | |
Black text |
Lexmark backs the C500n with a one-year warranty. Free, toll-free phone support is available on weekdays from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. and on Saturdays from noon to 6 p.m. ET for the length of the warranty. You can add a year of support for $124, two years for $244, or three years for $402.
What You'll Pay
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