Lexmark C540N Color Laser Printer

by Lexmark

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 15.8 x 16.7 x 11.5 inches ; 46.3 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 55 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B001F4R2CO
• Item model number: 26A0000
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: September 1, 2008

Product Description

Bring your business documents to life with high-quality color output from the Lexmark C540n laser printer. With its ultra-compact design and quiet operation, the C540n is the perfect desktop companion for fast color laser printing. Also, connect multiple users with ethernet networking.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent color laser but it'll cost you a fortune in toner, August 19, 2009

By 

E. Simoni (Denmark) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Lexmark C540N Color Laser Printer (Office Product)

This is by far the best printer I have owned. For a color laser it is small and convenient. Setup was very easy including installing it on our home network. I also like the toner tanks instead of the usual roller tanks. It is also comparatively lightweight compared to some of the monster size color lasers available. I choose color laser to avoid the inkjet rip-offs. Print quality is excellent for both color and text, the unit is quiet and comletely silent in standby. There's an eco mode meaning it uses almost no power in standby-mode (about 14W). It works great with both XP and Vista.

--------------Update - 8 months of use -------------------
The print quality is exellent but the toner cost will ruin you. We have printed about 1,100 pages and already used up the toner that came with the unit and one set of new toners with 2,500 page capacity. Obviously the toners won't give you 2,500 pages - my guess is that our's has given us about 600 or so. Most of what we print is text so I will assume our usage pattern is average. Cost per page including cost of hardware runs close to 75c per b/w page. The reason: I just emptied the waste toner - It was full so be warned - that is where your toner goes!

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Vista driver and status monitor need a lot of work, August 8, 2009

By 

Billy Hollis (Nashville, TN United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Lexmark C540N Color Laser Printer (Office Product)

Let's get the pros out of the way first:

- The setup is easy and straightforward

- The print quality is pretty good for a printer in this price range

- Speed is acceptable, even in color

- It's not as noisy or bulky as other color lasers I've owned

Now for the rest.

This printer is obviously designed for *very* light duty printing. The specs say the paper tray will hold 250 pages but I couldn't get more than about 200 in without bending paper. The specs also claim the output area will hold 100 pages, and that's nonsense. I printed a 74 page manual, and got a jam after 52 pages.

And that's when the fun began...

I cleared the jam, but the printer refused to recognize that the jam was cleared. It kept insisting the jam was still there.

At the same time, the Lexmark Status Monitor just quit working. I got Vista's dreaded "This program has stopped working" dialog. (I'm on 64 bit Vista Ultimate.)

So I turned the printer off and on. The good news is that it realized it wasn't jammed. The bad news was it began spewing pages of random garbage. (I realize Vista's print spooler was partially responsible for this.) Stabbing the Cancel button on the printer stopped it after about a dozen pages.

So I went to Vista's print manager, and tried to cancel the job. Nothing I could do would effect a cancel. Since this functionality worked fine on the printer this one replaced, this has to be the fault of the Lexmark driver.

So I rebooted Vista, and the cancel still didn't take. This time I let the manual run (carefully taking pages from the output area about every 15 or 20). But I don't know what I would have done if I really needed to cancel.

I really hate to submit a negative review, because my initial impressions were quite good. I suppose if you use this little guy for very light duty work, you would probably be fine. The hardware seems well worth the price if the drivers worked better. Perhaps the XP drivers do work better, and the Vista drivers just have not been worked on enough. (By the way, the same driver disk applies to the C543 and the C544, so I would presume they have the same problems on Vista I discussed above.)

I finally did get six nice copies of my manual. This thing was so inexpensive, and I've used so much of its toner, that I don't feel right taking it back, so I'm keeping it. But you can bet the next time I print manuals it will be Lulu or a quick copy place.

*** Update Sept 7, 2009

I've worked with this printer a month now, and I'm telling you outright: If you have Vista, especially 64 bit, don't buy it.

The software that comes on the disk with the printer is simply unusable on Vista 64 bit. The problems I discussed above are still there, and I've discovered more.

I finally uninstalled everything that was installed from the disk, and went to Lexmark's site to get something better. That seems to work a bit better so far (at least print jobs can now be cancelled), but it took power user experience and some inspired guessing to locate the right download. Their support web site is just awful.

I now wish I had taken this thing back, even after using up its toner. It has cost me hours trying to make it work.

A note about Windows 7 based on their web site. When Windows 7 is released in stores (it's already in the hands of corporations and MSDN subscribers) only then will Lexmark EVEN SAY WHEN DRIVERS MIGHT BE AVAILABLE. So I wouldn't expect the driver situation to get better any time soon with Windows 7 (for any Lexmark printer).

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Don't Buy This Printer, January 12, 2010

By 

Fair & Honest (Medford, OR) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lexmark C540N Color Laser Printer (Office Product)

As a printer this one's about as dependable as all the rest, however it costs a fortune in ink. With cartridges running between $50 and $80 and the frequency in which you have to replace them, you'd be better off having your documents printed at Kinkos or Staples. Seriously... the low toner indicater light is on almost constantly. It's just another "low cost printer/expensive ink" ripoff. What a disappointment!