The fastest of Lexmark's small workgroup printers, and the most expensive, the T634N is a reasonably flexible mono laser. It uses a speedy 500MHz processor and has 64MB of memory.

So it's not exactly slow, and its quoted 43 A4 pages per minute (ppm) is not that far off the mark. The T634 managed to churn out 42ppm on average for text, pdf and mixed Word documents. That's impressive for something of this size, though we wouldn't expect anything less for nearly £1,300. Text quality was good, if not stunning, and images did suffer quite a bit.

The T634's rather tidy and compact outfit won't turn any heads, but is small enough to just about fit under a desk without encroaching on too much leg room. The base unit comes with a 500-sheet input tray and a 100-sheet multipurpose feeder. Among the various expansion options are a 500-sheet duplex unit and secondary drawer options with capacities up to 2,000 pages.

Besides the ubiquitous USB, the T634N has a 10/100Base/TX Ethernet port, and carries two extra internal card slots for extra expansion. The cartridge is a high-capacity number that doesn't exactly glide into its slot, but its capacity is a real bonus. Be aware, though, that replacing it isn't cheap.

The LCD menu is well laid out, and Lexmark has kept the number of buttons to five: just enough to make it simple to use and avoid the complexity of having one button that performs multiple functions and will confuse users.

Besides the drivers, there are various handy utilities including Markvision, Lexmark's web-based print management tool. It's very simple to use and, together with the blistering speed, makes this printer an excellent buy.

Contact: Lexmark
www.lexmark.co.uk

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