The Lexmark C544dn ($499 direct) is one of the newest in a long line of impressive color laser printers from Lexmark. A little too large to serve as a truly personal printer, it's aimed at a small office, workgroup, or busy home office, with ample paper handling, reasonably fast speed, and fairly high-quality output.

If you were to go by the model number alone, you might assume that the C544dn is Lexmark's latest and greatest successor to the Editors' Choice C534dn. It isn't. It actually fills a less-expensive slot in Lexmark's line, replacing the C532dn. In short, it's a step down from the C534dn, not a step up. But the good news is that, like the C534dn, it's impressive enough to earn an Editors' Choice.

The C544dn's paper handling is one of its strongest points. The standard 250-sheet drawer, one-page manual feed, and duplexer for printing on both sides of a page should be enough for most small offices. If you need more, however, you can boost the capacity to 900 sheets with an option that adds a 550-sheet drawer and 100-page multipurpose tray ($199 direct).

If you don't need a duplexer, you can get the C544n ($449 direct) instead of the C544dn, but if there's any possibility that you might ever want to duplex the extra $50 for the C544dn is well spent, since Lexmark offers the same paper tray options for both models, but no duplexer for the C544n. Lexmark says that the two printers are otherwise identical, so most of the comments in this review apply to both. Lexmark also sells a wireless version, the C544dw ($599 direct), which is essentially the dn model with 802.11n Wi-Fi added.

Setting up the C544dn is a little different from setting up most color lasers. The printer is relatively small for a color laser, at 11.5 by 16.7 by 15.7 inches (HWD), and relatively light, at 46.2 pounds, so it's easier to move into place than most of its competition. On the other hand, there's more work than usual involved in removing the packing materials. You have to remove a side panel, remove the toner cartridges, and then put everything back together. None of this is hard, but it involves more steps than most printers require.

Beyond that, the C544dn also earns a slap on the wrist for its network installation routine. As with most printers, the process is largely automated, but you're asked some preliminary questions, including whether you want to connect wirelessly. Given that the C544dn doesn't support Wi-Fi, the question can only serve to confuse people.

Lexmark says it includes the question because doing so lets the company use the same installation routine for all three of the C544 models, including the Wi-Fi version. That presumably makes life easier for Lexmark, but offering installation options that aren't appropriate for the printer you're installing is simply asking for trouble. Fortunately, the worst I can say for either the physical setup or network installation issues is that they are fleeting, one-time annoyances. Neither counts as a serious flaw.

I installed the C544dn for a (wired!) network on a Windows XP system, but according to Lexmark, it also comes with drivers for Vista, Windows 2000, Server 2003, Server 2008, Mac OS 10.2 and higher, and Linux. In addition, you can download drivers from Lexmark's Web site for Windows 95, 98, ME, and NT; Mac OS 9.2 and above; and several flavors of Unix.

On our performance tests, the C544dn turned in appropriate times for its engine rating, at 25 pages per minute (ppm) for both monochrome and color. I timed it on our business applications suite (using QualityLogic's hardware and software, www.qualitylogic.com) at 10 minutes 16 seconds, essentially a tie with the directly competitive Xerox Phaser 6180N, our previous Editors' Choice, which completed the suite in 10:22. The two printers even delivered similar times for each test in the suite.

That said, the C544dn edges out the 6180N overall for speed by being much faster on our photo suite. It averaged 21 seconds for each 4-by-6 and 36 seconds for each 8-by-10, compared with 1:02 and 2:33 for the 6180N.

The C544dn's output quality is best described as one step short of stellar. Graphics and photo quality are both better than most color lasers can manage, but not quite up to the best available. Text quality is slightly subpar for a laser, but still good enough for almost any purpose.

More than half of the fonts in our text tests were easily readable at 5 points, with some qualifying at 4 points. Most of the fonts that qualified as easily readable at 5 points also qualified as well formed, but one of them needed 6 points to pass the well-formed threshold because of character spacing issues. Unless you have a highly unusual need for perfectly formed characters at small sizes, you should be more than satisfied with the C544dn's text quality.

Graphics were better overall than you'll get from most color lasers, despite a slight misregistration—blocks of some colors didn't line up perfectly, leaving a small slice of white between them. I also saw some slight dithering in the form of mild patterns in some colors, and posterization, with shading changing suddenly where it should change gradually, but nothing I'd call seriously objectionable. Most people would consider the quality good enough for anything up to and including marketing materials like one-page handouts and mailers.

Photo output was also better than most color lasers can manage. Some colors—particularly reds—in some photos were a little outside of a realistic range, but most photos were nearly true photo quality. Mount them in a frame behind glass and they would pass for traditional photos from a few feet away. As with the graphics, most people would consider them easily good enough for marketing materials.

The C544dn's combination of fast speed, high-quality output, and price doesn't quite leave the 6180N in the dust. In particular, the 6180N has the advantage on text quality and is still very much worth considering. That said, the C544dn has a slight edge on speed and price, and slightly better-looking photos. On balance, that gives it the advantage, and lets it squeak past 6180N as the new Editors' Choice for small-office and small-workgroup color lasers.

Check out the Lexmark C544dn's performance test results.

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