Lexmark Z42 & Z52
Price: AU$299 (Z42); AU$399 (Z52).
Distributor: Lexmark Australia
Ph: 02 9930 3500; Fax: 02 9930 3550
www.lexmark.com.au
Functionally, the Z42 and Z52 are pretty much identical to the Z22/32 printers, they are simply larger in stature, faster, and boast higher resolution. In the process of making the Z42/52 bigger, Lexmark also took the opportunity to make the two more robust. For example, the fold out support for the sheet feeder is not as flimsy and, being the nominal -flagship" of the range, the Z52 boasts a two-tone grey plastic finish and a cover at the rear to hide the parallel, USB and power connectors. The Z52 with its higher throughput rating also appears to need more -juice" to drive it and forgoes the 30V 0.5A external AC power adaptor of the other three printers for an even larger external -brick" with a 30V 1A rating.
The printer drivers for both units also boast more bells and whistles than the more basic driver of the Z22/32 printers. Print resolution has taken a climb to 2400 x 1200dpi and Lexmark claims the Z52 has at least twice the print speed of the Z22, for example.
The documentation is pretty much the same as the Z22/32's docs, although the Z52 has been endowed with a -prettier" quick setup sheet. All four printers utilise the same model Photo cartridge but our cartridge life tests only focus on the black and standard tri-colour cartridges. Outputting 320 and 340 pages at 5 percent black, respectively, the Z42 and Z52 were quite a way behind many of their competitors. Colour cartridge life was also mediocre and not helped by what we assume was a -crook" cartridge on the Z42 which only had a life of 147 pages at 15 percent coverage, compared to the Z52's 207 pages. Given the purchase price of the cartridges this breaks down to a pretty steep 20 to 21 cents for black. Colour is not so bad as the cartridge is modestly priced and if we ignore the Z42 results the cost per 15 percent colour page is around 38 cents.
In our performance tests, we found that the Z42/52 printers certainly do up the ante when it comes to churning out straight text documents with the Z42 peaking at 5.3ppm and the Z52, the fastest of all the printers tested, at 6.9ppm. Anything more complex however takes the wind out of both printers sails with an average throughput of 1.04ppm and 1.24ppm, respectively, for the Z42 and Z52. This is still significantly faster than the Z22/32 printers and in the case of the Z52 was still enough to propel it to second place. The average throughput test was performed with the drivers set to -Normal 600 x 600" and the quality of the text output was stunning. All the Lexmark printers produced sharp well-defined characters with strong rich blacks, even white on black text was sharp. Black area fills at this resolution were not as even as most of the competitors on plain paper although the graphics output on plain paper was on par with most of the competition.
The Z42 and Z52 printers were the slowest in their class producing photo output with scores of 0.1 and 0.12, respectively. The quality of the output was certainly superior to the Z22/32 printers the dither patterns and ink droplets were noticeably finer and less intrusive. However, given Lexmark's claim of 2400 x 1200dpi the ink droplet size and pitch appeared a little coarse when compared to many of the competition. The colour of the Z42 was more natural than the Z52 at default settings, the Z52 was just a touch too over saturated.
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