Lexmark Laser Fax/Copier - Please help!!!

[cyberface]

Executive summary - my brand new Lexmark X364dn is not working after printing ONE page, and I'm in need of solutions or suggestions to buy a new printer and throw this one away - if you know about printers then please help me by reading this....


After 4 or 5 years of trusty use, my old Brother laser fax / copier finally gave up and covered each printed page with random black lines and smears everywhere.

Not a problem, it's definitely paid for itself, so I decided to pop out and buy a decent *laser* printer that also does fax and copy. Virtually every shop only sold inkjet home-oriented all-in-one devices - this is for my business, I consider all ink-jet printers a complete scam (due to the ink scam that is always done) and I much prefer the crispness of a good laser printer when printing invoices etc.

I'm not a heavy user by any means, but the odd copy is required, plus when I print invoices etc. they have to be crisp and high quality. Most important is quality - time is much more valuable than money so I'm perfectly happy to pay for an expensive printer if it will last a decent amount of time, work quietly and without fuss, and the laser toner doesn't need to be replaced frequently / expensively.

Actually just *finding* a laser fax / printer / copier was a problem at first, in the end I had a choice in PC World of two models, both Lexmark. The nice thing about these compared to my old Brother printer is that they have a flatbed scanner / copier on the top, as per a regular office photocopier. I'm sure it's not as heavy duty as a 'real' photocopier but my uses aren't heavy duty. It had a network interface built in, and no 'home' BS like photo printing or wireless adaptors etc. Looked ideal, and wasn't cheap like the rest so I assumed it was going to be of reasonable quality. The model number is X364dn.

Looks like I was wrong. I got it home, unpacked as per the instructions, and a couple of days later (an office re-organisation was required to make space for the bigger printer), I put the printer on the desk in its new space, connected up to network and mains power, filled it with paper, and turned it on. This was last night.

It went through the startup process, spammed my network with a bunch of protocols (I notice these things) and then printed out a beautiful, crisp page entitled 'Ethernet 10/100' showing the detail it'd picked up, it had got an IP address via DHCP but also spotted the Apple Bonjour (zeroconf) protocol and registered itself with my server. Excellent.

I didn't need to print anything so left the thing along with the rest of the office machines when I finished for the evening.

This morning I came down to the office to work, and the printer was roaring a fan, and was flashing a red light and displaying '922.08 Service Fuser Error' on the LCD. I hadn't printed anything since the test page when it first started up.

So is this printer junk? As I said, time is money, and the amount of time it'd take me to get suitable packaging (yes I'd chucked the original box), return to PC World, argue about returns and faults, wait for the printer to be sent away, etc. will cost me more than just throwing this one in the local tip and buying a new one. And yes, I'm serious, which is a shame and says a lot about the disposable society we live in

Or is there something easy I can do? Anyone know? If it's junk, and DOA (even though it printed ONE perfect page on startup), which model should I buy to replace it? I need mono laser, good quality, fax and copy, network if possible (I have a network print server if not). I don't care about cost, just quality and longevity. I don't expect it to fail on the first page or make a crazy noise (as this Lexmark is now doing).

Have I bought a lemon, and are Lexmark complete crap when it comes to printers? I didn't have any choice in the shop, and I had a requirement to print stuff that day, so needed to buy one from a shop rather than order over the internet (that requirement ended up not being filled in the end...).

Any printer experts here? I've done a google and found that 922.08 is a fuser temperature issue and I've tried the recommended solutions (restart, different power source, and I've tried a different power lead too) - all result in the printer turning the fans onto max and raising the above error code, and I can't print anything.

[marshalla]

http://www.all-laser.com/aerrorlex/

2/3 of the way down.

Looks like you got a faulty unit from the shop.

[cyberface]

Damn. From the 'best laser all-in-one' polls it appears that it's a toss-up between Brother's offerings and Lexmark's offerings - including my device - so actually I haven't bought a known crap machine, it's just an unlucky lemon.

From the spec, the 'feel' of the hardware and the actual setup process and easy communication with my Mac network, I was hoping it'd be perfect.

Just need to get my head round the 'lemon' idea now, I'll go back to PC World and buy another one (assuming they have one in stock), and use the box from the new one to return the old DOA one to them. If they want to try to waste my time arguing the toss about repair / refund / replace, then I'll simply leave it there - once I've comprehensively tested that the new one works, of course

What I was more concerned about was the likelihood that PC World would firstly contest whether it was broken or not, and then want all the original packaging and to send it back to Lexmark at my cost and time. As far as I'm concerned I bought from a bricks-and-mortar shop so it's their responsibility this soon post-sale, but I don't know the law so I'm not going to start arguing 'Sale of Goods Act' at them. If they need to return it to Lexmark for repair then that's OK, I'll buy a new one, they can send the old one off and when it comes back working, there'll be a bargain printer on PH classifieds

[Tallbut Buxomly]

Not sure how pcworld works but lexmarks are usually pretty good pieces of kit though i would probably get a brother before a lexmarc i feel they are somewhat more reliable in the overall stakes. Fuser errors are very common in boggo laser xerox phasers so i would advise not replacing it with a xerox laser at this point seen too many of those pop up with a fuser error.

As said its probably simply a lemon. Its merely a question of whether you wish to gamble on getting another and having the fuser fail within a few hundred pages or get a brother and give them a shot instead. As you maybe can tell i am a big brother fan after seeing just how much abuse they can take and still keep functioning.

Hp do a k550 which is just a colour printer and is a very effective machine when it gets going and will churn out pages very quickly over and over again but they burn through ink very fast(hp printers). Hp business laser range is said to be very good in terms of speed and i believe reliability is also fairly high.

[cyberface]

Tallbut Buxomly said:

Not sure how pcworld works but lexmarks are usually pretty good pieces of kit though i would probably get a brother before a lexmarc i feel they are somewhat more reliable in the overall stakes. Fuser errors are very common in boggo laser xerox phasers so i would advise not replacing it with a xerox laser at this point seen too many of those pop up with a fuser error.

As said its probably simply a lemon. Its merely a question of whether you wish to gamble on getting another and having the fuser fail within a few hundred pages or get a brother and give them a shot instead. As you maybe can tell i am a big brother fan after seeing just how much abuse they can take and still keep functioning.

Hp do a k550 which is just a colour printer and is a very effective machine when it gets going and will churn out pages very quickly over and over again but they burn through ink very fast(hp printers). Hp business laser range is said to be very good in terms of speed and i believe reliability is also fairly high.

Well, my previous device was a Brother, which initially was a right pain due to nonexistent Mac OS X support, but proved to be a *very* reliable and rugged printer - it lasted 5 years!

I'll look again, but IIRC the big PC World near me only had ink-jet Brother multifunctions - I'm sure that if they'd sold a laser model then I would have chosen that over the Lexmark, purely because the old Brother machine lasted me so long...

I'm not interested in ink-jet printers from any manufacturer - they're simply not an option, however cheap they are sold and however 'reliable' they are meant to be. This isn't just because I prefer the print quality from a laser, or just because I only need monochrome, but also because I disagree rather aggressively with the entire ink-jet scam...

Thanks for confirming what I thought though Brother would be my first choice due to history, but the actual Lexmark device I own *would* be ideal if it worked. The flat-bed scan / copier and the footprint is perfect for my office, and the network integration without any messing around was impressive. If this failure was typical of poor Lexmark build quality then I'd definitely be looking elsewhere (and castigating myself for choosing poor quality when high quality was the requirement!), but if this is a rare lemon then I'll just get another Lexmark device the same and let PC World deal with the return / refund / replacement / repair / whatever. The Brother equivalents I've googled for seem to be all a fair amount larger physically - a wider footprint - and this wouldn't be ideal given my limited desk space.

The Lexmark looks as if it ought to be a damn fine machine - it's designed well, the materials are of reasonable quality, and initial impressions were very good. Hopefully this 'lemon' fails like many lemons - it's either a failure from the start, or if it works for a few weeks then it's likely to last years Do you think that it's likely that a new 'good' unit would suffer fuser failure within a few hundred pages? To me that'd denote poor quality, whereas a random initial failure like mine could happen to any manufacturer. After all, if there's a filament heater in there, then harsh shocks in transport by PC World could turn a factory-QC'd known-good device into a lemon.

[mattley]

cyberface said:

so I decided to pop out and buy a decent *laser* printer that also does fax and copy.

Quoted in case the OP edits in order to hide his delusional fantasy disorder.

[Tallbut Buxomly]

Cyberface i honestly couldnt say. Have very little experience of lexmark machines however they are very popular in terms of the old ribon printers where the pages are all attached to each other with holes punched down each side to feed through the ribbon printer which are normally very heavily used and abused in dirty or dusty warehouses etc and seem to go forever.

As far as fuser problems go I know xerox had a lot of problems with fusers overheating to the point the white casing around the fuser was warping and going yellow in their phaser laser printers and iirc also some of their colour lasers hence why i suggest steering clear of them.

As for the fusers getting damaged in transit tbh to damage them i think you would have to damage the box it comes in to do so so i would suggest inspect the box for creasing and dents. Ie check the spine on the four corners of the box and if it looks deformed as if being dropped flat on a flat surface from height then reject it and ask for another.

I am of the feeling if it works ok for the first few hundred then it shouldnt ever give you problems but you can never be sure.

[cyberface]

mattley said:

cyberface said:

so I decided to pop out and buy a decent *laser* printer that also does fax and copy.

Quoted in case the OP edits in order to hide his delusional fantasy disorder.

Well in the absence of any emoticons I can only assume this to be a fking rude comment.

I have nothing to hide, and no 'fantasy disorder' that I'm aware of.

What are you trying to say? That 'decent' laser multifunction printers are simply not available, that all such devices are necessarily rubbish quality? Or is this nothing to do with the printer, and you're just insulting me as being 'delusional'?

If the first, then perhaps you could reply with some fking useful content that other people would also find useful and thus add information to PHers who do a search in the future, rather than being an obnoxious smartarse and wasting space.

If the second, then I can't be bothered to write a witty put-down that you won't have the intelligence to comprehend, so a simple 'fk you, asshole' will have to suffice.

[mattley]

cyberface said:

What are you trying to say? That 'decent' laser multifunction printers are simply not available, that all such devices are necessarily rubbish quality?

Exactly this and only this.

Please accept abject apology for any offence there was none meant.

[TotalControl]

Cyber, IIRC from my time at PC World (years ago), you could have a better range of printers available to you if you went through the PC World Business Centre. Just open an account and see what they have from their catalogue. I'm sure they should have something there which is possibly better.

Edited by TotalControl on Thursday 15th April 22:17

[cyberface]

mattley said:

cyberface said:

What are you trying to say? That 'decent' laser multifunction printers are simply not available, that all such devices are necessarily rubbish quality?

Exactly this and only this.

Please accept abject apology for any offence there was none meant.

Fair enough, and please accept my apology for strong reaction above.

In historical analysis, the *vast* majority of my use is simple mono laser printing. Before I had a fax-to-email function (which I now do), I'd need the fax receive functionality, and outgoing faxes I reckon less than 10 times a year. I've never scanned *anything* into the Mac - mainly because the Brother device I had before didn't have Mac drivers, and I found I didn't need to. But I *did* copy a fair amount of things - mostly copies of bills / official documents etc. for council / taxman / etc.

In order to do outbound faxing, I'm either going to need a scanner to get a pic onto the Mac and then email-to-fax... or a printer that has a fax built in.

It goes without saying that I want a high quality laser printer.

So what do you suggest? Most of the kit on the market looks very much like the manufacturer takes their laser printer and then bolts the fax / copier bit on top. If the 'bit on top' is always of poor quality, this isn't the end of the world because I only use the fax and copier functions sparingly. But I *do* need a decent printer. And if the 'bit on the bottom' is just the same as the bare laser printer I could buy alone, then is it *really* that bad to buy the multifunction?

Or are the bottom half bits of the multifunction printers different, much lower quality laser printing modules? I'd have thought that for efficient manufacturing, the multifunctions would just be the standard printer with a cheap scanner bolted to the top - in which case, even if the scanner is crap, surely there must be multifunction printers out there with *decent* **printer** modules?

Seriously - if you know otherwise, and that the actual printer 'bits' of the multifunction lasers are sub-standard or inferior to the manufacturer's 'printer-only' devices, then can you recommend a good laser printer and some other solution for outbound fax or copy that doesn't take up huge amounts of space?

The Lexmark printer does seem ideal in terms of design and functionality - but as we've seen, mine doesn't work. But if buying a Lexmark laser printer (at around the same price point, paper sources, resolution, etc.) gets me the *same* module as the one in my multifunction, then either *all* Lexmark products are not 'decent', or all laser printers are not 'decent'.

Please remember that this is an office of a small *consulting* company here... we don't need thousands of pages a year! We sure as hell won't be putting the sort of workrate on the printer that most departmental office printers have to take - we're on client sites most of the time. For example, we've never used more than three reams of A4 per year. Perhaps your expectations are based on large-volume big-company offices, where the machines are in pretty much constant use and any lack of integrity is shown up brutally... my expectations are very low in terms of volume, but high in terms of quality. A cheap ink-jet would do the job because of my very low *volume* requirements, but I'm not happy with print quality of ink-jets, amongst other factors.


The odd thing is that it's the *printer* module in my Lexmark that's failed - my assumption that Lexmark would simply use their tried-and-tested laser printer module and bolt a cheap scanner / fax to the top would suggest that the first thing to fail would be the scanner / fax!

I've seen HP LaserJet printers on client sites that have to pretty much print non-stop all day, so very high load, and seem to perform OK. I may miss the constant stream of technical support chaps who fix the things but downtime seems to be pretty low. One of these small laser printers with a scanner / fax bolted to the top would be perfect - and in look & feel, the Lexmark is exactly that. I haven't seen an HP equivalent on sale to compare to though...

[randlemarcus]

cyberface said:

I've seen HP LaserJet printers on client sites that have to pretty much print non-stop all day, so very high load, and seem to perform OK. I may miss the constant stream of technical support chaps who fix the things but downtime seems to be pretty low. One of these small laser printers with a scanner / fax bolted to the top would be perfect - and in look & feel, the Lexmark is exactly that. I haven't seen an HP equivalent on sale to compare to though...

Mutter, mutter, serves you right for going to *hawks* PC World then. To be fair, I wander through client offices and see a fair few Lexmarks as well as HPs. Most corporates are much of a muchness.

Last printer I got was a recon from a Staples store - nice colour laser for 50% RRP. Not a MFD, though (and guess whose expenses policy just changed to require scanned receipts, dammit)

Given your position now, though, leave the cables in situ, and simply take the device itself back, and pick up another. Its bricks and mortar after all (and they are quite susceptible to loudly persuasive arguments)