Testing 240 Lexmark Printers: The A4 Paper Size Problem No One Expected

It Started as a Routine 240-Printer Order

In September 2024, our warehouse received a 240-unit order from a school district that had standardized on Lexmark printers. Most of the units were the Lexmark B2338 printer—a compact mono laser for offices and classrooms. Six older multifunction units were in the same batch, headed for counseling offices and faculty rooms after a year in storage.

I’m the quality/brand compliance manager on the warehouse side. I review every configured unit before it reaches a customer—roughly 200+ printer and supply deliveries each year. I’ve rejected a small percentage of first deliveries this year because of configuration errors. I expected this order to be routine. It wasn’t.

Lesson One: The A4 Paper Size Default Was a Trap

The school district’s teachers share materials with international colleagues, and that means A4. Per ISO 216, the A4 paper size is 210 × 297 mm. Letter is 8.5 × 11 inches—a bit wider and roughly 18 mm shorter. The difference seems small until a table’s right column drops off the page.

Our test routine checked that the paper trays could feed A4, but we hadn’t checked the default paper size in the driver. That became obvious when a teacher called on the third morning. “I printed a handout, and the right side is cut off. It’s the new printer in the history office.”

The handout was an APUSH score calculator—a table the history department used to estimate AP scores from raw points. A colleague had sent the document from Canada, and it was formatted for A4. The driver was still set to Letter. The printer didn’t scale the page; it clipped the content. We diagnosed it on the Lexmark printer X5650 in the faculty office, but the same thing could happen with any model.

From the outside, this looks like a simple user mistake. The reality is that modern drivers don’t always auto-scale. They honor the Paper Size field in the print dialog. If that field says Letter and the PDF is A4, you get clipped columns. I’ve seen this on multiple brands, not just Lexmark.

That afternoon I drove to the district with a test laptop. I printed the same APUSH score calculator table on the X5650: clipped. I changed the default paper size in the Lexmark printer preferences to A4, printed it again, and it came out clean. No driver update needed. No tray replacement needed. Just one setting.

Lesson Two: Windows 11 Made the Default Printer Situation Worse

While we were fixing the paper issue, the district reported that print jobs were going to the wrong device.

Windows 11 has a setting called “Let Windows manage my default printer.” When it’s on, the OS can switch the default to the most recently used printer. In a shared faculty office, the result is confusion: teachers send one job to the hallway Lexmark B2338 printer, then the next day it defaults to another printer across the building. One teacher printed a practice exam and didn’t realize it had gone elsewhere until she walked to the wrong room.

Here’s how to set default printer in Windows 11 if you’re dealing with the same problem:

1. Open Settings → Bluetooth & devices → Printers & scanners.
2. Turn off “Let Windows manage my default printer.”
3. Select your Lexmark printer and click “Set as default.”
4. Close Settings and print a test page.

This is the path that worked for our customer as of January 2025. The old Control Panel window still works, but Settings is more reliable on current builds. What most people don’t realize is that a Windows update can re-enable the managed setting, so it’s worth checking if odd defaults reappear after a feature update.

We pushed a short guide with screenshots to the district’s IT team. Support calls about misplaced print jobs went from several a day to zero within a week. I don’t have an official metric in front of me, but the change was obvious.

What Our Checklist Looks Like Now

We changed the process. Every Lexmark B2338 and every older X5650 now goes through an explicit step: set the customer’s primary paper size in the driver, then print two test files—one Letter, one A4. If the A4 file prints clipped, the configuration fails the check, even if the paper feed works fine.

Put another way: the printer was doing exactly what the settings instructed. The settings were wrong. In our warehouse, the driver defaults had been inherited from previous US-based profiles. We tested paper compatibility but not formatting defaults. I should add that most print problems we see in the field are not hardware jams. They are configuration mismatches.

For schools using the Lexmark B2338 printer, the fix is straightforward. Its driver exposes the default paper size in Printer Preferences. For older units, I want to say we also reset all six X5650 printers to factory settings before shipping. Don’t quote me that it’s mandatory for your unit, but it clears out weird retained settings and gives you a clean baseline.

What This Experience Does and Doesn’t Prove

I should offer an honest limitation. My experience is based on school districts and small offices—mostly standard document printing on mono laser printers. If you’re a print shop producing large-volume color work or using specialty paper, you have different requirements. A4 and Letter defaults are just one layer of the quality check, not the whole thing.

To be fair, the Lexmark B2338 printer isn’t the fastest or the cheapest model in Lexmark’s lineup. If price is your only criterion, you might find lower upfront costs elsewhere. What worked for this district was the security and administrative control: school IT could lock down settings, track usage, and prevent students from changing defaults. That was worth more to them than the small price difference.

And the X5650? It’s an older platform, but it handled A4 materials fine once configured correctly. The machine wasn’t broken. The configuration was wrong.

The Bottom Line

By shipment day, all 240 printers had the correct paper defaults, and the Windows 11 setting was locked on the district’s machines. The APUSH teacher got her score calculator printed intact. No clipped columns since.

If you’re setting up a Lexmark printer for a school or office, take ten minutes to check two things: the default paper size in the driver and the “Let Windows manage my default printer” setting. Those two small details caused more support tickets in one week than any hardware failure I saw all year.