At $399 (direct), the Lexmark C500n is one of the most affordable color laser printers on the planet. Even more impressive is that for this price, it makes no compromises on output quality, offers good speed, and has a network connector.

Pcmag has a review of this printer. Here are some of their impressions:
The C500n’s output is just what I expect to see from a color laser. The text quality was one small step below the best I’ve seen, making the printer good enough to handle any text you’re likely to print. The majority of fonts I printed were easily readable at 5 points, with crisp, well-formed characters; some were easily readable at 4 points; and even the most stylized, difficult-to-print font in my test suite was easily readable at 10 points.

Graphics were good enough, but as with many printers, you should avoid thin lines, which tend to disappear. Photos were near photo quality too, which makes them fine for things like printing client newsletters or Web pages.

One minor issue is that the driver forces you to pick a color mode manually—for documents, graphics, or photos—rather than automatically selecting the appropriate mode for the image. In my tests, choosing the right mode often improved the image, but color quality was acceptable in most cases no matter which mode I went with.

All told, the C500n doesn’t offer quite enough to replace the C522n as our Editors’ Choice, but if your budget won’t stretch beyond $400, and particularly if you need to attach to a network, the C500n is clearly the printer to get.

Read the full review here.