Superb printing right out of the box
Lexmark has been steadily gaining share in the printer market over the past few years (it's now #2, behind market leader HP) and its new models are perhaps the company's strongest entrants yet.
PC Buyer's Guide has been testing the Z65n in a variety of printing tasks since its release in the Spring of 2002 and it's safe to say the company has a real winner here.
Setup of the unit was a snap. I dropped the colour and black cartridges into the appropriate colour-coded receptacles, slid some paper into one of the unit's two paper holders (more on this topic later), connected the AC power block into the back and connected a USB cable. Seconds later, my test computer, running Windows Me, sprang to life and prompted me to insert the Lexmark CD. The installer found the appropriate driver and, a couple of mouse click later, I was ready to print. This simple procedure contrasts strongly with the awkward manual software installation procedure required by some HP printers, such as the DeskJet 722C.
"Grayscales and photos looked virtually perfect...."
The first page the Z65 offers to print is an automatic alignment sheet. It printed flawlessly -- the crispness of the printed edges on plain paper was as good as that of any other printer I've ever tested. By the time the test page had finished, a tiny trace of banding near the top of the page had disappeared and subsequent printouts showed no discernable banding whatsoever. Grayscales and photos looked virtually perfect, within the limitations of the paper on which I was printing.
Here you may discover another of the Z65's very cool features: it has an automatic paper type sensor. The printer can automatically detect if the paper in tray #1 is plain, clay-coated, photo/glossy or transparency and optimize the print quality automatically. Considering the horrific cost of glossy paper, this is a fantastic feature. For optimal "quick print" results, Lexmark recommends Hammermill Jet Print or Pacific MicroPrint inkjet paper. For photo printing, Kodak inkjet photo paper is recommended.
The printer's dual paper trays allow you to keep both letter and legal size (etc.) paper in the unit and switch between them at will. According to Lexmark, the unit's relatively straight paper path and "Accu-Feed" paper handling system can handle paper stocks up to 150 lbs. Again, this contrasts strongly with the U-shaped paper paths of virtually all HP DeskJet models, which tend to cause feed problems with heavier stocks. Out only quibble with the paper-feed mechanism on the Z65 is that it tends to be a little more challenging when one is inserting new paper. But, if that what it takes to avoid paper jams (and, apparently, it is -- I encountered no problems at all), I'm all for it.
Once the test page and an optional sample page have finished printing, the printer driver automatically connects you the Lexmark website where you can register your product, download driver updates (which I didn't bother with, at least until I tested the unit on a second machine running Windows XP -- I'm a subscriber to the "if it ain't broke..." school of thought here) and receive technical support. So far, so good.
The Z65's print properties dialog is certainly one of the fancier dialog boxes I've ever seen from a printer manufacturer. It provides beginner-friendly print wizard functions in a menu labeled "I want to..." that aim to help you increase the quality or speed of your printouts, print photographs, print on an envelope, print a banner, print on both sides of the paper, assemble a poster by "titling" several sheets together or printing many pages together on one sheet, and other printing tips. The driver (optionally) talks, to tell you what's going on with your print job.
Experts can elect to hide these tips by default. And -- hurray! -- there's even an option to save the settings for up to six different custom printer configurations. Tabs show at a glance your current settings: Quality=Normal, Size=Letter, Two-sided=Off, and so on. There's even an option to produce booklets, with automatic duplexing and pagination. It's hard to see much missing from these user-friendly options.
The Lexmark Z65 supports print resolutions up to 4800 x 1200 dpi (5.8 megapixels) on photo paper, coated paper and transparencies and delivers resolutions up to 4800x600 on plain paper. The unit's so-called "PrecisionPhoto" technology drops ink onto the paper using a variety of dual ink nozzles and ink bubble chambers, producing drops measuring between three and ten picolitres in size, producing, the company says, better colour transitions and more detailed textures. Really, this seems like little more than marketing hype to me. I couldn't easily distinguish between the print results produced by the Z65n and the older (7-picolitre) Z53. Nevertheless, the images looked good, although grain is clearly visible even at 4800x1200 dpi, when you get really, really close.
The company claims print speeds up to 21 pages per minute in black and 15 ppm in colour but admits that no standard benchmark for comparisons exists, so these numbers should be taken with a grain of salt when comparing different brands. Most users will be likely to achieve these page-per-minute speeds only on the simplest of documents printed at the lowest quality (300x600 dpi) settings. When printing a colour photo at the highest quality settings, you're likely to wait between six and 10 minutes for a single page. The "best" quality results on glossy photo paper look great -- better than a top-of-the-line (C$709) HP DeskJet 995C on some images, and slightly below it in others. On plain paper, I'd rate the "better" quality photo output as so-so -- it's quite grainy, really.
The Z65n sells for US$229.99 (about C$299). Lexmark Canada product manager Hugh Dyke told PC Buyer's Guide that, later this summer, a Z65 model without the onboard 10/100baseT Ethernet interface will be released in Canada for about $20 less. Both units support Windows XP (all versions, although the driver I tested had not been "signed" for Microsoft's Windows XP quality control certification), Windows Me, Windows 2000, Windows 98 (all versions), Windows NT (via Ethernet), Mac OS 8.6 or 9.x with USB interface and Mac OS X with USB interface.
As regular readers of PC Buyer's Guide know, I like to point out the weaknesses in the products I review. In this case, I really can't find much to complain about other than the printer's relatively high cost per page. CNET calculated the costs at 7 cents (US) per text page and 55 cents (US) per colour page -- much higher, it notes, than the similarly priced Canon S750, which works out to 2.7 and 19 cents for similar pages, respectively. PC Magazine found that, at just 50 pages a week, a Lexmark printer will end up costing you US$260 per year for ink.
Lexmark says a $51.99 black cartridge will last for 600 pages, assuming a nominal 5% ink density. A $59.99 colour cartridge, it is claimed, will last for 450 printouts with a 15% coverage. In other words, most users won't see this many pages from their black or colour cartridges, especially if they print out a lot of photographs. In extreme cases (e.g, printing out a PowerPoint presentation with a coloured background), you might get as few as 18 printouts from a $60 cartridge! Although Lexmark doesn't officially approve of refilled inks, there are a number of third-party ink suppliers that claim to support the Z65.
Based on dealers I've spoken to and reports I've read, it appears likely that Lexmark printers have a slightly higher failure rate than comparable models from market leader HP (which tend to be more expensive, by the way). However, Lexmark has an excellent warranty policy that serves to address this potential issue with a one-year, next business day exchange warranty.
Countering this issue is the fact that each of Lexmark's cartridges, unlike those from Canon or Epson, contain a print head. Thus, you pay a little more for the cartridges, but you are in effect getting a whole new print head with each one. Over the years, my experience with HP printers, which also employ this system, has proven that this significantly reduces long-term hassles such as clogging, streaking and text quality deterioration. And this issue, along with Epson's use of so-called "Smart Chip" (AKA non-refillable) cartridges, is the reason I doubt I will ever buy another Epson printer. And, although Canon fans maintain that Canon printheads developed since the advent of the S600 don't have the wear-and-tear problems that made their predecessors deteriorate prematurely, I remain skeptical after examining printouts from heavily used demo models at local computer stores.
The Z65's use of a single three-colour cartridge instead of separate color-ink cartridges didn't really bother me much until I ran out of blue ink after printing out less than 20 pages of a presentation I was working on.
As the scan of a printout shown here attests, photographic printouts from the unit tend to favour the red side of the spectrum a little. I did not find the colour fidelity to be unacceptable, although some reviewers cite poor colour matching as their major complaint with the unit. I tried manually changed the color palette settings to "Natural Colours" in the Quality Options dialog, but could detect no discernable difference from the results produced by the "automatic" setting. Under Windows XP or Mac OS, colour matching support is provided by the operating system, but defaults to an sRGB setting -- generally considered the lowest common denominator in the colour-management world.
As I found with Lexmark's previous ink-jet printer offerings, choosing to output a black-and-white photo apparently does not cause the driver to print it with the black ink cartridge. Selecting "Print Color Images in Black and White" in the print dialog produces notably grainier -- and much faster -- results than those of a grayscale photo produced using the default "composite black" settings. This issue, which also affects HP printers, by the way, leads me to conclude that Canon S800/900 series (both employing six separate color cartridges) or Epson 890/1290 printers (also six-color units) may be a better choice for those primarily focused on printing colour or grayscale photographs with the best possible color fidelity. However, for mixed-use printing, especially when the printer may go unused for a week or so from time to time, you're likely to find that the relentless cleaning cycles of these brands make them more of a frustration than HP or Lexmark models.
Considering the low price differential between the Z65 and the Ethernet-equipped Z65n, the latter is a better choice for those running an Ethernet network. The high ink consumption makes this unit a somewhat worse choice that the HP DeskJet 960cse and 990cse (both of which can accept extra-large economy colour cartridges) for photo-printing enthusiasts, but it's a great choice for anyone looking for a general purpose, mid-range ink-jet printer, particularly for applications where the printer's high speed and dual paper trays are valuable. Recommended.
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