According to conventional wisdom, attaching a colour inkjet printer to an office network is like trying to demolish a skyscraper with a hammer; fast colour laser printing has long been considered the only viable technology for this scale of duty. Unfortunately laser technology can be prohibitively expensive for small businesses. Printer manufacturers are seeking to fill the colourless niche with enhanced-performance inkjet printers that promise laser performance with inkjet economy. ZDNet reviews hauled Lexmark's offering, the J110tn, into its offices and unleashed a band of colour-hungry sales, advertising and promotions staff onto it to see how it fared.

Getting the J110tn from its box and on to our network was relatively easy. We use the term 'relatively' because we did hit some strange obstacles that we couldn't adequately explain. These included error messages and false printer maintenance software prompts, and instructions to use hardware features that didn't exist on the printer. Aside from these problems, had the printer's network adapter and software worked in the manner they were designed, the installation would have been simple. The glitches didn't lose their mystery until Lexmark informed us that the J110tn they'd sent us was an engineering sample, and we bore that in mind throughout the rest of the review.

The J110tn that we received seemed to be specifically tailored for network environments, and that's over and above the fact that it is purpose-built with an integrated 10/100Base Ethernet port. It performed better in this scenario than it could when attached to a PC via parallel cable; it took longer to initialise and although its speed remained stable, it had difficulty completing large print jobs and tended to stop after 60 pages. These problems didn't surface when the printer was run on the network.

Our casual observation of the J110tn tended to support the wisdom that colour inkjets can displace mid-range colour lasers in the small business environment. It was fast enough to handle the printing needs of our sales and advertising team, and we didn't need to sacrifice any performance to get an acceptable quality print. Our test unit managed to print approximately 8000 high surface-density, colour documents over a period of 3 working days, almost completely depleting its ink tanks.

Like the Xerox DocuPrint M750 we reviewed last month, the J110tn's ink tank has a modular design that allows the cyan, magenta and yellow ink supplies to be replaced individually.

According to Lexmark the print heads need only be replaced once over the expected operating life of the printer, or 30,000 pages. Lexmark says that the printer offers lower cost-per-page printing than most "typical, mid-range colour laser printers", but there are some problems with Lexmark's claim. The first is the company's defintion of 'typical'; the second lies in a disparity between the printer's advertised duty cycles and their engineer's real world expecations of a J110 when placed in the hands of its target market.

If Lexmark's product comparisons provide a useful indication, in this instance 'typical' seems to mean colour laser printer with monthly duty cycles in excess of 30,000 like the colour LaserJet 4550N; it is isn't quite an 'apples and oranges' comparison but you're heading in that direction.

The second problem is more complicated. Despite the fact that the J110tn's advertised duty cycle is 10,000 pages per month, Lexmark's estimates that it will only be called on to print around 2,500 in the field, and that's what its print head replacement forecasts are based on; around 12-18 months service with one print head replacement. The 10,000 page duty cycle is a little meaningless and you'd certainly be looking at a very high maintenance machine if you tested its advertised endurance everyday.

Comparing the J110tn and another colour heavy-duty inkJet printer such as the HP 2500CM gives a more meaningful indication of its abilities. The HP 2500CM specifications and usage-class roughly match that of the Lexmark J110tn. Both are capable of handling multiple print media (transparancies, photo-quality stock and labels) and photo-quality printing. At normal quality the 2500CM prints around 3 A4 letter pages per minute (ppm) and costs around $US1,499. The Lexmark prints around 9 colour pages per minute and costs around $AU2300. To be fair to HP part of what you pay for with the 2500CM goes towards the cost of including Adobe's proprietary post-script printing language, Adobe PostScript 3. The HP's monthly duty cycle is a fraction more robust than the J110tn's at 12,000 -- as opposed to 10,000 -- pages per month (whatever that figure is worth to you).

One feature that helps contribute to the J110tn's cost-per-page economy is Lexmark's PerfectFinish technology. PerfectFinish allows the printer to print at its highest quality on cheaper paper stocks without excessive ink-bleed. We were happy with the J110's print quality but we would be lying if we said that PerfectFinish improved it significantly.

There is a cheaper version of the Lexmark J110tn, the J110, that is identical to the tn sans network integration features. Choosing this version will save you AU$200 but it's hard to imagine anyone but home consumers -- who are unlikely to plant a bulky workhorse like this in the family den -- and some SOHO buyers taking advantage of this modest saving.

Lexmark J110
Company: Lexmark
Phone: 1300 362 192

Price:

• J110tn AU$2,499    • J110 AU$2,299

Rating:
Distributor:Lexmark Australia

Copyright © 2009 CBS Interactive, a CBS Company. All Rights Reserved.
ZDNET is a registered service mark of CBS Interactive. ZDNET Logo is a service mark of CBS Interactive.