Lexmark Z2420 review

The plain-looking Lexmark made a fairly low-key entrance into our supertest.

What does make the Z2420 stand out from the crowd, however, is a small aerial tucked away at the rear. This is one of the few printers in its price bracket that's able to connect to your PC via WiFi. It's designed for use with 802.11b and g networks, and although it's compatible with the newer, faster 802.11n standard, you won't get the benefit of the higher speed or range that 802.11 networks can offer. However, in practice an 802.11g connection shouldn't prevent you achieving the same kind of print speeds that you would with a USB cable.

None of the budget inkjets we tested this month could be described as heavyweight, but the Z2420 verges on the flimsy, with its extending paper trays feeling particularly slight. Once we'd managed to get it onto the desktop without breaking it, setup was straightforward, with a walkthrough on the supplied CD explaining how to install the black and combined colour cartridges and configure the wireless connection.

Things went downhill when the Lexmark began printing. Our misgivings about those rattly paper trays were borne out by less than reliable paper feeding. Some pages were taken up just a shade off straight, leading to slightly skewed output. And once printed, pages easily flopped out of the teeny output tray and straight onto the floor.

In a printer that, if not exactly 'budget', isn't among the most expensive you could choose, all this could have been forgiven if we'd been bowled over by the sheer quality of the output. In company with the other affordable inkjets, the Lexmark did make a decent fist of text printing, producing legible characters with no raggedness around the edges, even on standard copier paper. It was also the fastest of this month's batch in standard mode, knocking out our 10 page text document in a little over a minute.

Sadly, it came unstuck in our 6x4 inch photo test. Printing onto glossy photo paper, it got through our six prints in a relatively quick four minutes and 37 seconds, but they lacked vibrancy and were dogged by banding, showing the pale horizontal lines that generally result from imperfect motor control as the paper is moved through the printer.

We liked the WiFi feature, which will appeal if you tend to use one or more laptops around your home or office rather than sitting at a desk all the time, but our reservations about the Lexmark's build quality, and the dire quality of its photo output, make it impossible to recommend.