In the lower part of the front, there is a paper tray of 250-sheet capacity. The tray is equipped with sheets size regulators, and support not only A4 and Letter, but much larger Legal format. It should be noted that when installing the latter media size the tray stands out from the back side at about 55 mm. For ease of use, the center front part of the tray provides a cavity handle. There is also an additional slot for loading envelopes and other custom formats.
The MFP is equipped with rather simple CIS scanner with a maximum optical resolution of 600×600 dpi, which is sufficient to work with the documents. The cover of the scanner is very light, yet its walls are rather thick and tough, and very difficult to bend. Formally, the standalone mode (working without a PC) is not supported, since there’s no ability to install the flash media. But, in fact, the Lexmark x203n can send scanned documents to one or more email addresses without using a PC – just connect it to a network with Internet access.
After a long idle time, the scanner takes about four seconds to warm up. During the test, a great feature was observed: when scanning in “b/w” and “grayscale” mode, the readiness time is only two seconds, while in color mode preparation time increased fourfold. Also worth noting is the slow process of pre-scanning, whole 15 seconds.
The Lexmark x203n is very smart, and printing begins in a few seconds after sending the print job. On average, it takes 2.6 seconds to print one page in “draft” and “normal” quality modes, which is, in fact, stated by the manufacturer. When you set the high quality mode, one page is printed, on average, in 5.5 seconds.
In addition to standard quality modes – “Draft 600 dpi”, “normal 1200 IQ” and “high 1200 dpi” – there is also the 2400 IQ (“IQ” is for image quality) mode. In the quality settings, there is also amplification of dots and fine lines. Automatic toner economy mode is not present, but there provided a manual adjustment of the toner density (ten levels). Paper saving mode allows printing of 2, 4, 8 or 16 pages on one sheet. Worth noting is the possibility of separate settings for type and source of paper for the first and last page of the document, as well as front and back covers.
Copy mode is quite simple, although representatives of the manufacturer noted that it is one of the main functions of the device. Of course, only monochrome copying is available. There are numerous copying options available: scaling, format conversion, indication of the size of the original, selection of paper source, activation of paper economy mode, adjustment of intensity, selection of one of three quality modes (text, photo & text, photo), as well as a breakdown of copies. The feature worth noting is the maximum number of copies, 999, whereas most MFPs of such class are limited to 99 copies.
Lexmark x203n MFP is a pure office workaholic, which is unlikely to take root at home, despite his rather “home” design and compact size. But when used in the office, the MFP has a major plus – the high speed of printing and scanning in “b/w” and “grayscale” modes. The high-speed copying is advantageous, too: the first copy is already obtained in 9 seconds, and every subsequent one – in 2.6 seconds.
We can easily name some other features and advantages of the Lexmark x203n: quality toner cartridges, additional manual tray, network access, user-friendly web-interface that allows you to control all functions of the device, a lot of different scan profiles in the semi-autonomous mode and ability to scan and send documents without using a PC to one or more email-addresses,. Unfortunately, there are also disadvantages like inconvenient monochrome display, few scan settings even when using TWAIN-driver and the original Lexmark toner are more expensive compared to the competitors.