The Z605 is an extremely cheap injket printer most suitable for those who only print intermittently.The Color Jetprinter Z605 is Lexmark's budget offering to the market. Unfortunately, the appeal of the low asking price is quickly set back by its high ink costs. With plenty of competition in this segment, the Z605 may prove a hard sell.
The Jetprinter Z605 keeps the familiar curvy styling of the former Z- series. However, instead of staying plain white, the Z605 is clad in a sexy black-and-grey housing. Finishing off the look is a nice metallic-silver power button. Besides the basic design, this Lexmark comes with an AC-DC adapter that attaches itself to the rear of the unit--which makes you wonder why this was not built in the printer from the get go.
Targeted at the home, this inkjet measures just 403 x 215 x 134mm, making this unit easy to hide or tuck away. The 1.77kg frame will also make light work of moving the printer around should that be a requirement.
Like most consumer-oriented inkjets, setting up the Z605 is relatively straightforward. Follow the quickstart guide, connect the printer to the PC, install the drivers and you're good to go. Well, almost--the Z605 played a little game with us. The consumables were colour-coordinated (generally a plus). However, there was no mention of having to remember the model number of your ink cartridges until the setup screen prompted you for the variants (moderate- or standard- yield) installed! Adding to the downside, our usual pet peeve remained unaddressed with the manufacturer still not throwing in a USB cable.
The Z605 specifications are 14ppm (pages per minute) and 8ppm for monochrome and colour, respectively. Taking into account the low price, these are some pretty big claims. In our speed tests, though, this model completed our draft-quality 10-page test in about 1 minute 44 seconds, putting it on a par with the Epson Stylus C43UX. All this sounds good except that the C43UX's rating is only 12ppm. Still, this really isn't that bad as the Z605 is also only 20 seconds behind the much dearer Canon i470D. The cycle pretty much repeated itself in the photo test runs. The Z605 prolonged our wait by a further 9 minutes over the already agonizing 20 minutes the C43UX put out.
In terms of print quality, text output was mediocre, producing legible 3.5-point font size text and up. The inkjet's colour graphics were good overall with only slight dithering visible on some of the outputs. On the flipside, the draft outputs of the Z605 were not very clean, resembling turnouts you'd expect from most photocopiers. Failing to impress as well were the photo printouts. Even with the high 4,800-optimized dpi rating, the unit produced photos with visible dithering. As expected, this entry-level printer does not support "borderless" prints as well.
The Z605 ships with moderate-use cartridges that Lexmark claims are good for 205 pages of black-and-white and 140 pages of colour. These are pretty standard numbers for low-yield inkjet cartridges till you factor in the price. At around AU$31 and AU$34 for the black and colour inks, respectively, this works out to a rather high AU$0.14 per monochrome and AU$0.21 per colour print. Even with the standard-yield black and colour cartridges (manufacturer- claimed 410 and 260 pages), the AU$47 and AU$51 costing still translates to a rather expensive AU$0.10 per monochrome and AU$0.18 per colour output.
The Lexmark Color Jetprinter Z605 cannot negate the maxim "you get what you pay for". The inability to detect the type of ink cartridges installed, and the mediocre photo quality land it in poor light. Even so, in our lab tests, this Lexmark has print performance comparable to the competition, with text printing besting some higher-end models. It's when you factor in the high running costs that this unit shows itself more suited for those who print intermittently.
Lexmark Z605 Color Jetprinter
Company: Lexmark Australia
Price: AU$99
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: 1300 362 192
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