never buy lexmark again – ever!

My advice to anyone considering a new printer. Choose a Canon, or an HP, or a Fuji Xerox – anything except a Lexmark!

About 12 months ago, I bought a new colour laser printer, a Lexmark C500n, having had a gutfull of expensive inkjets with drivers that don’t get updated. I wanted to get a postscript mono printer, but family pressures for colour, and what seemed like an excellent deal from Lexmark, swayed me.

Since Leopard (OSX 10.5) was installed on a laptop at home, however, we’ve been having trouble. Investigations led me to realise that the driver is not compatible with Leopard, so I asked Lexmark for an update on when we might see a compatible driver. I got this response:

Thank you for contacting Lexmark Email Support.

In reply to your email, I am sorry to say but Lexmark C500n is a host based printer. Unfortunately, Lexmark has no plans to develop the Mac compatible driver for this printer. You can use Mac 10.4 compatible driver to run this printer on Mac Leopard. However, if it does not work then there is no other driver available to install this printer. I apologize for the inconvenience cuased to you in this regard.

Inconvenience!?! The printer cost me $400 and I’ve spent about $300 on toner… that’s quite an inconvenience, and a copy and paste apology just isn’t goint to cut it! Especially when you can still go to the Lexmark website to research the printer with the accompanying details: “Apple Macintosh Operating Systems Supported Apple Mac OS X Apple Mac OS 9.x”. Funny, I’d swear I’m using Mac OSX! This is plain old lying.

They seem to have found the resources to write a Vista driver, are there any windows users out there who want to buy a barely used printer?