Lexmark Z2320 review

At just £26, Lexmark's Z2320 is one of the cheapest inkjets around.

It replaces the Z1320, which won the Budget Buy award in last year's group test. While the Z1320 was a shiny white box, the Z2320 has rounded edges and a matt white and grey finish. It feels a little flimsy, but doesn't look too bad.

The installation CD begins with an illustrated step-by-step guide to unpacking and using the printer. The Z2320 is simple to set up. After plugging it in and extending the paper trays, you simply have to open the top cover at the top to get at the black and tri-colour cartridge slots.

In the box you'll find #14A black and #15A colour cartridges. The 'A' means that these cartridges are designed to be recycled with Lexmark, and are discounted from the standard cartridges. The yield of these cartridges is fairly low at 175 black and 150 colour pages - a mono page costs 6.5p and a colour page costs 9.1p. Combined, this leads to an extortionate mixed-colour cost of 15.6p per page.

The latest version of Lexmark's printer driver looks cleaner and is less cluttered than its predecessor. Quality, paper type and size are displayed on the main Print Setup page, along with borderless printing options. Extra features such as watermarks and photographic image enhancement have their own tabs. Unfortunately, changing the driver's settings to print borderless 6x4in prints didn't work on the first attempt, and we had to re-open the Properties window and close it again before the preview was correctly displayed.

Print quality was generally good. Draft text was dark and sharp enough to use for most day-to-day printing tasks and emerged at a very quick 10.6ppm. We were impressed by normal-quality print speeds of 9ppm. Characters were black with perfectly defined edges, although we noticed slight speckling on some pages. Unfortunately, our mixed-colour document printed at just 0.8ppm. Quality wasn't too bad, despite slightly jagged lettering at small font sizes and white specks on some areas of solid colour. Photo prints were grainy, and 6x4in paper was difficult to align correctly, but colours were vivid. A dedicated photo cartridge is available (#31), although we haven't tested it.

The Z2320 really falls down on some of the highest print costs we've seen recently. At the lowest prices we could find online, it would cost just under £26 to replace both cartridges. That's similar to buying a new printer complete with ink. Worse still, the combined colour cartridge has to be replaced as soon as any of its three inks run out. We prefer Canon's Pixma iP2600, which costs less to run.