Lexmark C3224dw Color Laser Printer with Wireless capabilities, Standard Two Sided printing, Two Line LCD Screen with Full-Spectrum Security and Prints Up To 24 ppm (40N9000)

Just received this today, so it is possible over time I may change my mind, and if I do, I'll update this review. But it is awesome so far! I'm replacing a 20-year-old high-end Brother printer, so I'll compare it to that. The Brother cost $600 20 years ago, so I was not expecting much at all from a $117 printer. Most of the negative reviews mentioned trouble connecting via WiFi. My first thought was I didn't care about that. I've never had a WiFi printer in the past and didn't see any reason it would be necessary now. However, I have gotten married since 20 years ago and we have kids and more computers in the house, so I figured if it worked that would be great and if not, well, it was only $117 and we didn't have a networked printer in the past so it would be okay. Of course, once it arrived, connecting it to WiFi became my first obsession! I guess I just wanted to try it that cool new feature! I've never connected a printer to WiFi and wasn't sure how it worked. The printed materials that came with the printer were totally useless. It's all pictures, no words and nothing about connecting via Wifi. But, all the info you need, really, is on the printer screen. Even though it's tiny, I was able to get the information I needed from it to connect it up. Basically, I turned the printer on, read the directions as they scrolled across on the tiny screen and followed the directions. It mentioned a Lexmark printer app, which I downloaded. I was able to quickly and easily connect the app on my phone to the printer and from there it was a breeze. It went through the steps and I was able to print from my phone. Which again, was not something I had ever imagined doing, much less anything I needed or wanted to do. But it worked and that was cool! Then it was off to connect two computers to it. First I plugged it in by wire to my wife's computer - which I think might have been a mistake. But at the time I thought that's how you had to do it. For some reason I wasn't able to get it to connect via WiFi on her computer because while the computer "saw" the printer, it kept asking me for a WPS PIN which it said was either printed on the printer or was on the printed materials that came with the printer. It was on neither. I gave up on that and went to install it via WiFi only on my computer. Actually I didn't really have to do anything. I opened the Printer Settings on my computer and clicked Add Printer, then find WiFi connected printer and it was right there. So it was already broadcasting the signal to all devices in our house and all I had to do was click Connect - and it worked like a charm. The weird thing though is it didn't ask me for any WPS PIN for my computer. And I'm guessing that's because I never connected it via wire - so it didn't halfway install itself by wire only to get confused by WiFi? I don't know. But I did not ever attach it to my computer with a wire and the WiFi connected up absolutely flawlessly. Then I went back to my wife's computer and using the disk that came with the printer I installed the drivers from that. And once that was done, suddenly it worked fine as a WiFi printer. Although it shows up in Printer Settings as (copy1) of the first attempted installation by wire, which still works if it's plugged in with the wire. Then for the big test. I moved the printer to another room! Would we both be able to print on it from our respective offices? My wife's office is closest and mine is further away... about 50 feet away and several drywall walls. From my wife's office, everything went off without a hitch. From my office - same result. Print Perfect both times. My old $600 Brother printer did excellent color prints, and this one does as well - for 1/6th the price. I printed a few photos from the Lexmark, as a test, and was absolutely amazed at their quality. They're almost photo-printer quality. In fact, if I printed them on laser photo paper, I think they'd look good enough to frame and hang. The other nifty feature is the double-sided print feature. Maybe this is something that's been common among printers for the last few years, I'm not sure. But if you're not used to it, it's very cool. It will print on both sides of the paper - automatically. In other words, you don't have to print on one side and then stick the page in upside down and print the other side manually anymore. It will print the first side, then suck the page back into the printer and print the other side! It's really amazing to watch if you've never seen a printer do this before. And it's so fast. One other plus factor is that it's much smaller and lighter than our old printer. The old one, I literally can't lift by myself it's so darn heavy. Something around 100 pounds I think. But this one is much easier to lift, it's like a heavy suitcase. We also appreciate that it takes up much less space than the old behemoth did. One con so far... they include about 7 or 8 sheets of paper (printed on both sides - that's 16 pages of printing) with nothing other than safety warnings - in every imaginable language. The length of the English text wouldn't take up more than about 2 paragraphs, not even a full page. So it's a colossal waste of paper they include and completely unnecessary. Not to mention the hassle they cause all their customers with so much extra paper they have to throw out. BIG WASTE. I have to think that the United States is their largest market and as such might warrant it's own version of this in English and perhaps Spanish. But no... they literally had to print it in almost every major language on earth - and send it in every major language to every customer! Totally ridiculous, wasteful and annoying. The only instructions are what looks like a hand-drawn diagram with little arrows drawn here and there. Not a single word printed on these two pages - where words would be extremely helpful. Apparently the folks at Lexmark don't want to *offend* anyone by writing in the language/languages spoken in the United States only, so they opt not to print any words at all. As if instructions in English might offend people! Like the United States is such a small market it's not worth their time and effort to print in English and Spanish. Other than that big annoyance though, we're both very pleased with this purchase. I'm still amazed at all the complaints - and really surprised it has only a 3.7-star review score. That's way below where it should be in my humble opinion. I have seen some reviewers say it worked well at first but after a few weeks it went bad. So, if that happens here, I'll come back and definitely adjust my score accordingly, and revise my review to let you know.

Almost didn't buy this based on all the 1-Star reviews, but realized they were mostly wireless connectivity issues. Having printers drop wireless connections is a Home WiFi given and is easily corrected by assigning an IP address to your printers. This is a bit of an advanced WiFi management issue, but the best thing you can ever do for printers, as well as any complex, LAN-connected items. It only takes a minute once you know how to do. Hooked it up to my WiFi, reserved and assigned the IP address that it took. Real nice that it's displayed on the screen, and off we went. Yeah, it's a little slow to first page print, but no rush. We're low volume users and I'm tired of inkjets' print heads gumming up. This should be the cure to that.

I took a chance and got this printer based on the positive Amazon Vine reviews. The set up was a breeze, even using just the control panel and not the app. However, I tried printing a 20-page PDF that has a file size of 5mb. The printer could not process the PDF and would only print a single page and give me an error saying that the memory is full. So then I tried to just print two pages from the PDF, and it can't even handle that. If it can't print a multi-page document it is pretty worthless. And there is no way you can print 24 pages a minute if you have to print them one page at a time. If you just want to print a single page all the time, than this printer would be great for you, and the print quality was good. But if you need to print a multi-page document... you'll want to look somewhere else. Needless to say, I will be returning this and buying another HP or Brother printer. Update #1 - I spent a whole day trying to get this printer to work. I reinstalled it multiple times, restored factory settings, reset it up, updated the printer firmware, updated my operating system, and then finally figured out that if I installed it using generic post script printing and boom! it works. There was zero support on the Lexmark website. So they lose a star for that.

I'm terribly disappointed with what this printer has produced. My heart sank on the first test page when what came out appeared to have been the product of an inkjet printer. I really thought I had mistakenly paid for an inkjet the quality is so poor. And now I've gone from feeling like a sucker to being completely furious. I causes me to reconsider that value of Amazon exspecially for more expensive items. I very much wanted to make use of this printer today. I don't get much time off. I don't have time for BS. If I had gotten this at a brink-and-morter, I could solve this problem today. I'd go back to the store, show them the garbage that came out of this printer and they'd likely help me. I'd get back home and could continue with today's work. Instead now I've got to go through the pain of trying to figure out exactly what hoops I've got to jump through to get satisfaction. It's possible that it's not the printer itself that's the problem but instead the toner cartridges it came with. That doesn't matter and it doesn't help me. I need a working device now. I don't have it. I've tried shaking the cartidges but it doesn't help. I've included a video showing what the printer produced. Note the inkjet printer-like patterning in the rainbow image. Even basic black text is spotty and broken.

This printer will not connect to your network. If it does, it will go back offline within 60 seconds. Don’t bother downloading the app...it’s not compatible with this particular model. Don’t bother calling customer service...they will tell you to go watch YouTube videos. Seriously. After being out on hold 6 times, the rep gave me a list of 3 YouTube videos to watch that “should” fix my problem. It didn’t. The QR Code that’s supposed to be easily scanned to connect your devices WILL NOT SCAN. I wasted two days trying to connect this piece of junk to my phone and it’s impossible.