Lexmark T640 Monochrome Laser Printer

Specialized and general office printing is consolidated on one printer supporting labels, heavy media, recycled media and specialty forms, Lexmark T640 series printer can be easily tailored to an array of business output application needs through the selection of input and output paper handling devices, wireless, wired or fiber network connections, and unique optional application solutions for PDF, IPDS, bar code, PRESCRIBE or encrypted data printing.
List Price: $641.99
Used Price: $445.00
Customer Review: Constant paper jams, bad design overall
I have had this printer installed at my place of business for about 1 year. I have constant paper jams from the add-on tray 2 that I purchased with the machine. This I believe is due to a design flaw which puts the pick up roller on a swing arm above a non spring loaded sloped bottom tray. The roller comes down to pick up the paper and it's not precise enough so paper jam occurs. I have improved the performance somewhat by adding a 1/2" block to the tray to raise the paper some more. Bad design as well if you are using the multi use tray (for checks, etc). Pickup roller is at the left end of the tray (instead of in the middle like the HP), so the paper goes in crooked and sometimes jams. The add on tray is also huge leading you to believe you can fill it right up (like with the HP), but you can only fill it half way, and the tray that comes with the printer only holds about 100 sheets. Another minor annoyance is that when you want to use the multi use tray, instead of defaulting to that tray when there is paper in it, you have to select it every time. Bottom line: spend the extra money and get the HP. I wish I did.
Customer Review: Slooooooow!
I installed this printer a year ago at a non-profit I work for. It has a couple of gotchas, which caused us massive grief for a few months. If you print via the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP), the printer will crash periodically on seemingly random jobs. When it crashes, it doesn't automatically reboot. Reconfiguring your print server or desktops to use the LPD (or other protocols) will fix the problem. Lexmark has all but forgotten about this printer, and hasn't offered a software update since May of '07, and the frequent crashes are not addressed on their support site, but *are* mentioned all over the internet. :-) We are a PostScript based shop (but really just print Word and Excel documents), and this printer's emulation software is adequate, but unbelievably slow. I wrote some simple PostScript test pages which fly out of our other printers, but not the T640. When warmed up, time to first page varies from 5 to 60 seconds. The printer is *very* eager to print. The moment a print job starts downloading, the fans, rollers and drum fire up in anticipation. Then they shut off twenty seconds later because the PostScript interpreter hasn't finished rasterizing the page. It makes you get up from your chair ("It's printing!") only to fake you out. :-) Generally, PostScript benefits from having more available memory, so I added 512MB to the thing, and it really didn't make much difference. So yeah, the printer does what it's supposed to. Just slowly.