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.
6%
1%
