As a small-workgroup mono laser printer, the Lexmark B2338dw ($199) provides good speed and paper capacity (including lots of optional trays and accessories). Output quality is mixed, with good text and slightly below-par graphics. Running costs are on the high side for standard cartridges, but you can recoup a bit by getting cartridges through the Lexmark Return Program, which mandates cartridges be sent back to Lexmark, bans refills or unauthorized cartridges, and in effect provides an expiration date after which your cartridge will not function. Overall, this is a solid budget-minded laser churner for moderate monthly document loads, though we'd still opt for the Dell Smart Printer S2830dn in this price class.

Laser Churner With Roomy Paper Options

This two-tone (off-black and off-white) printer measures 10.2 by 15.7 by 14.7 inches (HWD) and weighs 30.6 pounds. The angled front panel includes a tiny, two-line monochrome display for navigating the printer's menus and changing settings. Below that is an OK button flanked by back- and forward-arrow buttons. Low-cost mono lasers are not known for their spacious displays, but this one felt even more cramped than usual.

The B2338dw comes with an automatic duplexer for printing on both sides of a sheet of paper—in fact, the printer is set by default for duplex printing—and a paper capacity of 350 pages between main tray and feeder. Optional 250- and 550-sheet trays are available, including a lockable tray for the latter capacity, for a maximum capacity of 900 sheets. The plain 550-sheet tray goes for $199 (the lockable version is $249), while the 250-sheet tray is $129.

Lexmark's rated maximum monthly duty cycle is 50,000 sheets, with a recommended monthly volume of up to 6,000 pages. This pegs it for up to medium-duty printing in a small workgroup or a micro office.

Lower Your Running Costs (With a Catch)

Based on Lexmark's price and yield figures for its standard consumables (for the B2338dw, this includes the toner cartridge and an imaging unit), cost per page comes to 4.2 cents, which is high for a mono laser. The Canon imageClass LBP151dw's costs run 3.5 cents, while the Editors' Choice Dell Smart Printer S2830dn has costs as low as 2 cents per page if you use its highest-capacity cartridges.

Lexmark actually sells the same consumables for less (which would lower the cost per page to as little as 3.1 cents), but there is a catch. Cartridges sold under the Lexmark Return Program can be used only once and not refilled. Also, they will stop working after they reach the end of Lexmark's rated life, and the cartridges may automatically update the memory in your printer to protect against the introduction of counterfeit and unauthorized products. If you're willing to abide by these restrictions, you may save some money, provided that you aren't locked out of using your cartridge if you don't use it up quickly enough.

The B2338dw ships with a starter Return Program cartridge. It's rated for 1,500 pages, half the yield of a normal cartridge, so you'll be jumping into this official-or-unofficial cartridge decision before long.

Connectivity and Setup

The B2338dw offers Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and USB connectivity, which is typical for its class. I did our formal testing over a USB 2.0 connection using our Windows 10 PC testbed. I also did some ad-hoc speed testing over an Ethernet connection, which actually proved a little slower than printing over USB.

You can install three drivers when setting up the B2338dw: Lexmark's XL universal printer driver as well as a PCL driver and a PostScript driver. When installing the drivers over a USB connection, only the first driver (XL) installed automatically, although the setup wizard had indicated that the software for the others had seemed to download. To install one of the other drivers, I had to click Add Printer from the Windows Devices and Printers page, choose the Add a Local Printer option, select the Virtual Printer Port for USB option, and scroll through a long list of printers sorted by manufacturer. The Lexmark B2338dw was listed under an alternative name, the MS320 series (which, fortunately, I was aware of). All three drivers were listed there, and I was able to select the one to add.

One other driver quirk to note: In the settings menus on the printer's display is an item called Printer Languages, from which you can switch between PCL Emulation and PostScript Emulation. Ignore this setting. To switch to PCL or PostScript, you need to change the driver you're using from within the Print dialog box in Windows or in the application you're printing from.

Zippy Enough, Sharp Enough

You should have no complaints about the B2338dw's speed. Lexmark rates it at 38 pages per minute (ppm) for simplex (one-sided) printing, and 19ppm, or 38 images per minute (ipm), for duplex printing, where each side of a page counts as one sheet. Rated speeds are based on printing text documents; in printing out our 12-page Word test file, I timed it at a zippy 44ppm in simplex, and 19.7ppm in duplex. On our full 25-page test suite, which adds more complex pages (with graphics and mixed content) to the Word document, it tested at 17.4ppm in simplex, and 13.4ppm in duplex. Both are good times.

Overall, output quality was a tad below par, based on our testing, with average text and photo quality and slightly below-par graphics quality. That said, take this with this modifier: "Average text quality" for a laser translates to being good enough for virtually any general business use except for those requiring very small fonts.

Graphics quality is slightly below par for a mono laser. Generally, charts and other graphical material looked good, although some very thin lines that were in color in the original Excel file were hard to distinguish against gray or black backgrounds. In printing a PowerPoint file in the default grayscale mode, one slide—which in the file shows a gradient ranging from dark red to light red and back to dark—printed as a nearly undifferentiated black, while a second slide's background—which also showed a gradient, which in the file is green—did not print at all, although the text did. This was the case with all three (XL, PCL, and PostScript) drivers.

It's not uncommon for mono lasers to drop out backgrounds (many seem to be set by default for grayscale), and in many cases this may be an improvement over having hard-to-read text against a muddied background, which is how the slide looked when I switched to Color mode (although, of course, output was still in black-and-white). In the latter situation, not only was some of the text poorly readable, but the gradient was also inconsistent, rather than transitioning evenly from dark to light and back again. The other gradient, which was red in the original art, was better in Color mode, though still not particularly smooth.

These issues are commonplace among black-and-white printers in printing from color sides. Some printers default to Color mode and print the backgrounds, but you can always switch between color modes (Color and Grayscale), which I suggest you do if you buy the B2338dw, to see which is better for slide printing.

Likewise, you can experiment with the printer drivers. Although the pages showing the gradients looked a bit different with the PostScript driver than with PCL, neither looked particularly good. The takeaway, though, is that this printer is a little below average for a mono laser in printing out graphics. The Dell Smart Printer S2830dn , for one, had better-than-average graphics quality for a mono laser in our testing.

Nobody buys a mono laser for photo printing, but nonetheless the B2338dw printed decent photos in testing, good enough for printing company newsletters or web pages containing photos. Detail was lost in the dark areas of some prints that were on the dark side, and dithering (graininess) was an issue in two of the prints.

Solid Budget Laser Output

The Lexmark B2338dw is a fast mono laser for small-workgroup use, with very good paper capacity including optional trays. Setup proved a little trickier than usual, but once it was up and running, it worked like a dream. Output quality was perfectly fine for plain documents in our testing, although graphics quality was slightly subpar.

Our overall pick for top lower-end mono laser remains the Dell Smart Printer S2830dn, but the B2338dw remains a capable choice, and is the preferable one if you need to boost your paper capacity by adding an optional tray.

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