Pros: Excellent image quality and color fidelity.
Cons: Slight roller marks visible on glossy paper prints; some propensity to misfeed paper. Few buttons on the unit mean most printer controls must be handled in software. High cost per page, as is usual for color inkjets.
Color printing has come a long way since the Apple ImageWriter, C-Itoh 8510 and other first-generation color printers chugged out streaky color bar charts and other and pages of dubious quality more than a decade ago.
Today, printers in the $500 range deliver image quality that resembles a glossy color photo. For those that work with graphics, publishing programs, or simply enjoy printing out a web page or other document as it looks on-screen, a color printer is a purchase that delivers the satisfaction of a worthwhile investment.
In this article, we’ll look at the Lexmark Color JetPrinter Series 7000, an inkjet unit sure to help you look your best in print.
As we’ve come to expect from Windows 95-based printers, the Lexmark 7000 installed and auto-configured without a hitch. The driver includes a feature we’ve not seen before, but like the idea of: a "drying time between pages" option to minimize the chance that your full-page masterpiece will be smudged while still in the exit tray.
Printing was very speedy. In the 7000’s fastest mode: (600x300 dpi bidirectional, dither off), an 8.5x11-inch page of graphics took only 8 seconds to print. (Like all printers, the actual printable area of a page is slightly smaller, due to the need for the printer to pull the paper through the unit.) Setting dithering to "airbrush" increased the time to 24 seconds.
A full page of color graphics printed on the high-quality glossy paper at the highest quality setting (1200x1200 dpi, unidirectional) took just over eight minutes to print. The results were spectacular, with colors more accurate and pleasing than those of the Alps MicroDry 2300, another of our favorite printers. Being a dye-sublimation printer, the MD2300 did not show any discernable dots, but at 1200 dpi, you have to look very closely to see them on the four-color Lexmark 7000.
As mentioned above, the printer’s fastest mode delivers 600x300-dpi print. "Normal" quality mode is 600x600 dpi (unidirectional), and "Best" ups the quality to the impressive 1200 dpi output best suited for use with glossy paper.
Naturally, the higher quality settings use more ink and thus raise the cost per page.
This is a key issue in inkjet printers and one well worth considering if image quality is not your only criterion. We were also concerned about reports from some customers -- also reported in PC Magazine (vol 16, #9, Nov 4,1997) -- of paper misfeed problems, although we did not encounter any difficulties in this regard.
The unit’s noise level was comparable to other printers in its class - a touch noisier than older inkjets which took much longer to print, but were whisper quiet. Today’s speedy inkjet printers are doing battle with physics. The faster the head moves, the higher pitched the noise level is.
We tested the unit on common photocopier bond paper, Lexmark’s special coated inkjet stock and glossy paper. Slight roller marks were visible on the glossy paper prints, which nevertheless gave us the highest quality results. (Limit image sizes to less than 9 inches high to avoid the ink-roller marks interfering with your image.) The printer also prints onto T-shirt transfer paper, transparency acetate and label stock, although we did not test these options.
At 300x600 dpi, the ink distribution is not heavy enough to cause any significant wrinkling of a plain-paper page. However, at 600 dpi, solid areas on plain paper exhibit noticeable dampness, and you really need to use special stock for 1200 dpi output. This special paper is expensive: the glossy paper costs about a dollar a page, in packs of 50. Fortunately, the output is gorgeous. Not quite up to the level of a glossy photo, but close enough to elicit oohs and ahhs around our office. Subjectively, we found the image quality to be better than that of Epson’s latest 600-series printers, and dramatically superior to our venerable Hewlett-Packard DeskJet 660c. All these units are four-color (CMYK) printers. Presumably, a future model will incorporate the six-color printing inks that are starting to appear in some inkjet models in this price range.
When you do the math, it's no wonder the Lexmark's output looks superior. At 1200x1200, it generates 1,440,000 dots per square inch; by contrast, the highest quality mode on the 1440x720 yields about 40 percent fewer dots, or 1036800 dpi. For a printer with a street price around C$549, the 7000 is an excellent performer. Highly recommended, on the condition that your local retailer stocks the necessary ink supplies. Lexmark does not recommend refilling cartridges and, at press time, we were unable to find refill kits that explicitly support it.
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