Lexmark Optra E312 10PPM 600X600DPI 4MB Par USB PSl2 PCl6

Since this printer's "little brother", the E210 came out, we have standardized on it. It is a bit cheaper and is actually rated slightly faster at 12ppm. The E210 also seems a bit smaller if desktop space is a concern.


Lexmark gets it right.   June 9, 2001
 16 out of 16 found this review helpful

When my old Brother laser printer died, I replaced it with a $99 Epson color inkjet. It's a cute little printer but its paper feeder is not very well designed and it drinks ink like there's no tomorrow. For $99 I got a printer that has cost me about $50 every two months in new ink cartridges. It was definitely time for a new workhorse printer, and after considerable research I settled on the Lexmark Optra E312. Its little brother, the E312L, is about $120 cheaper but lacks PostScript, and the other printers in the Optra E312 price range, such as the HP 1100, seem to be designed only for MS Windows. Since I run both Windows and Linux in my home office I needed something that was a little more flexible.

When I opened the box and lifted out the printer, I thought something was wrong; it was too light! Maybe they left the mechanism out? But no, nothing was wrong. After removing the shipping tape, I took the ink cartridge with its simple install diagrams printed right on top, pulled out the toner seal and inserted it into the printer. I plugged the E312 in and inserted the USB cable and hit the operator button to get a test page, which came out beautifully. This whole process took maybe five minutes.

Since Linux was running, I ran the Gnome print queue tool, which is an easy Windows-like dialogue box, and added the Lexmark as a postscript printer. I then printed a test page from the dialogue box and a web page from Opera browser. Both worked perfectly. The Linux setup was all of five minutes.

I next rebooted to Windows ME, inserted the CD-ROM, and let it rip. This process was a bit slower than Linux and included an automatic download of the latest drivers from the Lexmark web site. After persuading Windows to stop trying to reinstall the printer every time I rebooted, I finally had everything working in both operating systems.

What else can I say about this printer? It is fast and quiet and handles everything I've thrown at it with equal competence: web pages, Finale music scores, Microsoft Word documents. Its toner cartridge is rated for thousands of pages, its Postscript and PCL compatibility allow it to handle any kind of graphics and text, and its user interface is simple. This is what a small office printer should be like. The molded icons on the sheet feeders remind the user which way the paper should face, it's got two separate feeders with variable width adjustable trays for envelopes and other items, and an extra straight paper path for heavier paper.

My only complaint so far is the paltry 4M of memory that comes by default; heavy graphics jobs will require more memory, and Lexmark charges top dollar for memory upgrades, but one can add up to 64M if needed. A 16M upgrade costs $150 from Lexmark, but I've heard on the internet that you should be able to use a standard 72-pin SIMM which would be maybe one third or one fourth the price.

All in all this is a fine example of how to do things right: a well engineered, well documented machine that is almost effortless to set up and use. Lexmark got it right with this one.

12-4-2005 Revision
All of the above continues to be true with one major exception: the paper handling is flawed. When the printer started sucking 2, 3, or even 10 pages through at a time, I thought it was something I was doing wrong, but repeated calls to technical support did nothing to fix the problem ("riffle the paper, use only clean new paper", etc.). Therefore I must say that Lexmark's Optra E312 has a flaw. Since the printer is discontinued one can only hope that later models don't have this problem, but I am probably not going to get another Lexmark to find out.