The P707's cutthroat price along with its built-in memory card reader give the P707 tremendous value. However, its high running costs and slow print speeds make it hard to recommend.The P707 Photo Jetprinter is Lexmark's top-of-the-range inkjet, and also the first direct photo printer to arrive from the manufacturer. With a sticker price of AU$199, this unit is priced competitively and targets users with tight purse strings. Unfortunately, the deal is soured by its high ink costs and middling print quality.
The Jetprinter P707 keeps the curvy styling of the lower-end Z605. There is the same sexy black-and-grey finish complete with nice metallic-silver buttons. New this time round is the 6-in-1 memory card reader that resides on the right of the P707. If you don't need this feature, the Z705 is virtually the same printer but costs around AU$50 less.
Measuring just 472 x 236 x 152mm and hitting the scales at only 2.1kg, this Lexmark is scarcely larger than the Z605 and will be as easy to fit on your desk. Similarly, the light frame will allow you to move the inkjet around if that's on your list of requirements.
Setting up the P707 is--on the most part--straightforward. Follow the quickstart guide, connect the printer to the PC, install the drivers and you're good to go. But like the Z605, there is a need to remember the model number of your ink cartridges. The P707 improves on this slightly, though. It is able to detect the photo cartridge without issue, leaving only the color variant to contend with. As before, our usual pet peeve remains unaddressed, with Lexmark still not throwing in a USB cable--though we'll concede that by now most users should have an existing one already.
Adding to the list of improvements, the P707 Photo Jetprinter and Z705 Color Jetprinter come with Lexmark's PrecisionSense technology. Behind the fancy name is an automatic cartridge alignment system so users won't have to squint to work with calibration sheets, or plough through non-intuitive software.
The P707 ships with the normal color as well as a photo cartridge. If you wish to use the inkjet for tasks other than photo printing, it's recommended that you buy a separate black cartridge from an economical and performance standpoint. The basic specifications for the P707 are 17ppm (pages per minute) and 10ppm for monochrome and color, respectively. Take into account the low price, and these are very good numbers. In our speed tests, though, this model completed our draft-quality 10-page test in about 1 minute 48 seconds with a black cartridge, or 5.6ppm. If it was in its out-of-the-box configuration, the same test took a shocking 3 minutes and 15 seconds. So we were rather disappointed to see that this unit was slower than both the manufacturer's own Z605 and Epson's C43UX--both of which are budget units.
In the photo test runs, the P707 came up with the same timings as its smaller brother, the Z605. It took an agonizing 29 minutes for an A4 output with the photo cartridge, and just 3 minutes less when using the black variant.
In terms of print quality, text output was bearable, producing legible 3.5-point font size text and up. The inkjet's color graphics were good overall with only slight dithering visible on some of the outputs. On the other hand, the draft outputs of the P707 were not clean, resembling turnouts you'd expect from most photocopiers.
The biggest letdown, though, was the photo printouts. Even with the high 4,800-optimized dpi rating and additional photo ink cartridge, the unit produced photos with visible dithering and banding. And losing us totally was the fact that this photo printer does not support "borderless" prints!
The Lexmark Photo Jetprinter P707 appears to be a slightly bulked-up version of the Z605 with a memory card reader thrown in. The inability to detect some types of ink cartridges installed--albeit better over the Z605--, the mediocre photo quality and speed, and the nonexistent borderless outputs support this hypothesis. While we weren't able to obtain the exact costs of the cartridges and yields, our contact at Lexmark has mentioned that it will be similar to the Z605's cartridge pricings--which are expensive. While the unit has credible text prints, this unit is better suited for those who print occasionally or are less demanding.
Lexmark Photo Jetprinter P707
Company: Lexmark
Price: AU$199
Distributor:
Selected resellers
Phone:
1300 362 192
3%
5%
I have this unit and it is quite capable of printing both borderless 4x6 and 8.5x11 photo prints. I am not sure why the author stated otherwise.
TS