The Lexmark Z818 is a good-looking but otherwise humdrum colour inkjet printer. However, it is affordable.

The Lexmark Z818 colour inkjet is a sleek, fast, all-purpose inkjet printer that has very little going for it beyond good looks and zippy text printing. Despite its vaunted 4,800 x 1,200dpi colour and 2,400 x 1,200dpi maximum black-text resolution, the Z818's output is mediocre at best.

With the Z818 Color Jetprinter, Lexmark forgoes the typical breadbox-shaped inkjet body in favour of a sleek, forward-tilting, low-to-the-ground, flattop style. That shape, combined with its two-tone silver and dark-gray colour scheme with clear, dark-plastic accents, gives the printer a modern look. The Z818 is made of lightweight plastic and comes in at just 6.16 pounds (2.8kg). With its paper trays fully extended, the Z818 is of average size for an inkjet printer: 17.3 x 16.9 x 12.1 inches (440 x 230 x 152 mm). The control panel, if you can call it that, consists of two round buttons: one for paper feeding and one for power.

At the back of the printer you'll find a power supply connector and the USB 2.0 port. To connect the Z818 to your PC or Mac, just use the included USB cable. The Z818 is compatible with Windows 98, 2000, Me, and XP, as well as Mac OS X 10.1.5, 10.2.3 to 10.2.8, and 10.3.0 to 10.3.2.

The Z818 has a sturdy, rib-reinforced rear paper tray that rises up from the back of the printer to hold 100 sheets of plain paper or 10 envelopes. In front, a plastic access cover hides the print-carriage assembly and the Z818's two ink tanks. Etched inside the cover are four difficult-to-decipher pictographs meant to guide you through ink cartridge replacement. Fortunately, the colour-coded labels underneath the drawings match the printer's cartridges and their lids, so getting the ink tanks into their proper slots is foolproof.

The Lexmark Z818 comes as a four-colour (CMYK) inkjet printer with one colour and one black cartridge. You can turn the Z818 into a six-colour photo inkjet by replacing the black ink tank with a photo colour cartridge that's available from Lexmark. The photo cartridge greatly improves the colour quality of snapshots, especially high-resolution images printed on photo paper. The Z818 is capable of printing colour photos at up to 4,800 x 1,200dpi, but keep in mind that higher resolution does not automatically translate into better quality.

If you're using the Z818 as a photo printer, you can experiment with Lexmark's Photo Editor and Precision Photo software, the only items that come close to qualifying as extra features. The beginner-friendly Photo Editor gives you all the basic photo-editing tools. You can resize images, remove red-eye, crop a shot, and add text or drawings. Precision Photo offers more project-oriented features. You can choose from an array of single and multiple photo-layout options for albums or cards. The program also gives you a quick way to attach photos to e-mails and set up fun slide shows.

With a rate of more than 7ppm (pages per minute) for text, the Lexmark Z818 currently holds court as one of the fastest inkjet printers we've tested. Its photo-printing performance wasn't as impressive, however. It took up to 4.9 minutes to deliver an 8 x 10 colour photo -- not the slowest we've seen but pretty close. Throughout our tests, the Z818 performed very smoothly, if a little noisily.

In inkjet print-quality tests, which were conducted with the photo colour ink cartridge installed, the Z818 turned in a mostly average performance. For a supposedly all-purpose inkjet, the Lexmark Z818's text quality was especially disappointing. On the spiffy sheets Lexmark recommends, Kodak's Premium Inkjet paper, letters looked fuzzy -- likely the result of excessive dot gain -- which made fonts smaller than 4 points almost illegible. This was especially true of coloured text and gray lines produced with composite (CMYK) colour rather than shades of black. Thanks to the dithering algorithms, coloured dots appeared outside the lines. This also contributed to a generally inconsistent, washed-out tone on all coloured graphics. In addition, even after realigning the printheads multiple times, we saw severe horizontal printhead banding, which contributed to colour banding in the gradients.

The Z818 redeemed itself somewhat with its photo output, which was the best among the Lexmark printers we've tested. While they're far from perfect, our prints were reasonably well detailed and crisp, if a bit warm. We were unable to calculate the cost per photo because Lexmark doesn't disclose that information.

Lexmark covers the Z818 with a one-year LexExpress limited exchange warranty. This means that if it can't solve the problem over the phone, Lexmark will send a replacement unit to your door by express courier. This service covers all major and minor towns including remote country locations in Australia.

You'll find downloadable drivers, well-written manuals, a searchable knowledge base, and an e-mail link to tech support on the Lexmark Web site. Overall, the content is easy to browse and useful.

Lexmark Z818
Company: Lexmark
Price: AU$199
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: 1300 362 192

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