Lexmark's Z25 colour printer is incredibly cheap, and prints well. But you still can't get something for nothing.
Lexmark's Z25 colour printer is extremely cheap, extremely light, and only annoyed us in two key areas.
Setup of the Z25 couldn't be simpler. The printer itself is extremely lightweight, although it still has a fairly regular sized footprint. Tear off a single tab of blue plastic, install the print cartridges in the correct colour-coded slots, push in the power brick and plug in the USB cable, and the physical setup is done. There's just one thing wrong with this picture; like many, many other printers, the Z25 doesn't actually come with a USB cable. This is a particular pet peeve of ours; we realise that not shipping a USB cable does keep the costs down somewhat, and that the practice of not including cables harkens back to parallel printing days when the item most likely to die was the cable. USB cables, though, are quite robust, and exactly what you're meant to do in the meantime -- apart from going out and buying a cable anyway -- escapes us. In the end we stole a cable from a nearby ZIP drive and carried on, but not everyone will have a cable within handy pinching distance.
Like the physical setup, driver setup is smooth and easy. We installed under Windows 2000, but the Z25 also supports Mac and Linux platforms. Plug in our own USB cable, cancel the printer wizard, and step through the provided CD install process. The printer driver tracks ink usage, shows printing progress, and even has a pleasant and polite voice to tell you when printing has commenced and finished. In one of the weirder software choices we've ever seen, the printer interface is skinnable. We suspect someone at Lexmark has far, far too much time on their hands.
Lexmark claims maximum page per minute counts on the Z25 as 9 in black and 6 in colour. We're always rather wary of these claims; it's unlikely you'll see this performance even with the simplest documents, and by claiming a maximum rather than minimum value it's not as though you can get annoyed if it runs slower. What we can say based on our testing is that it manages black printing with reasonable speed, but like many budget inkjet printers, complex high quality colour image printing is a great excuse to go for a cup of coffee.
The Z25 handles resolutions of up to 1200x1200. We tested a variety of colour images of varying resolution and were well pleased with the results on both plain and high quality photo paper. You can't expect superfine production from a printer in this price range, but we had little to complain about in terms of colour bleed or incorrect colour presentation.
One thing that printing a large number of images did demonstrate to us is that the colour cartridges don't last an awfully long time. Lexmark offers cartridges for the Z25 in two configurations. The moderate user cartridge (AU$45.95 Black, AU$49.95 colour) was what we tested with, and after four high definition A4 prints, was 1/8th drained. Lexmark claim yeilds of 410 draft black and 280 draft colour pages for this cartridge, which is designed for those who only want to print very intermittently. At the other end of the spectrum, Lexmark offer high resolution cartridges (AU$69.95 black, AU$76.37 colour) which they claim can manage 820 draft black and 520 draft colour pages respectively. If you're likely to print a lot the costlier cartridges make more sense on a cost per page basis, except of course that by the time you've gone through two of them, you've spent more than on the original printer itself.
The Z25 is an absolute budget model; at AU$129 you can't expect a great deal. If you want to do a lot of colour printing, a model with bigger ink tanks would probably be a better bet, but for those who only print every so often the Z25 offers a lot of quality features for a very low price, as long as you factor in the cost of the extra USB cable.
Lexmark Z25
Company: Lexmark
Price: AU$129
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: 1300 362 192
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