Lexmark Lexmark W812 Laser Printer

WHAT'S HOT: Lexmark's W812 offers a great combination of performance and features. Chief among those features is support for printing on tabloid-size (11-by-17-inch) paper. The printer costs $2089 with an ethernet interface and produces clean, light text at a zippy 19.8 ppm (on letter-size paper). It also excelled in our judging of line art quality, producing accurate, narrow lines. And the W812 renders gray-scale images passably, in contrast to most monochrome lasers, which usually stumble on this test. The control panel menus on the printer's LCD screen are simple to follow.

WHAT'S NOT: The W812's drivers and documentation come on two different CDs, and confusingly, each CD has a different set of help files. While the help files on the documentation disc are choppy and hard to use, the manuals on the driver CD (one for end users and one for network administrators) are more comprehensive and easier to navigate.

If you want to use the duplex and booklet features that the driver supports, you'll need to add a mechanical duplexer, available separately from Lexmark for $499. This seems a likely choice, as one of the best uses for a tabloid-size printer is proofing books and other long-form documents.

WHAT ELSE: You can equip the W812 with two additional 250-sheet paper trays at $249 each, or add one 250-sheet tray and a $385 500-sheet tray. Tabloid-size printers tend to be large and heavy, but at 18 inches wide, 21 inches deep, and only 12 inches high, and weighing 46.5 pounds, this one isn't much harder to haul around than its letter-size siblings.

UPSHOT: For an office that needs oversize printing, the W812 offers performance and options at a reasonable price.

SUMMARY

Lexmark W812 $