New Lexmark printers with built-in internet news feeds

Posted on 1 Sep 2009 at 18:20

Lexmark has announced that its new range of printers will be able to display RSS feeds on their touchscreen displays.

This allows you to display any online content that uses the Really Simple Syndication (RSS) news feed format, such as the news feed from this website.

Three new inkjet MFPs will feature the SmartSolutions RSS support: the £399 Professional Platinum, £299 Professional Prestige and £199 Home Office Interact. Lexmark describes the new printers as "web-connected", but before you get excited about this, we'd like to emphasise that this doesn't mean you can use them to browse the web.

In fact, there's no internet browser functionality here at all; just RSS. This could have its uses, particularly if you can print directly from an RSS feed, but we can't think of many situations where this would be useful.

Lexmark is set to release eight new inkjet MFPs and while they don't all have SmartSolutions, even the cheapest, the £99 Home Office Impact, shares some useful features with the top-of-the-range models. The entire new range has 802.11b/g wireless networking, business card scanning that integrates with popular address book applications and new Eco modes, including automated two-sided printing for models with a duplexer.

We're actually most interested by Lexmark's new Vizix inks system, which uses separate ink tanks and promises mono print costs of 1p per page. Lexmark hasn't revealed much, so we don't know if the ink formula used in older printers has been changed. We'll be taking a close look at the new printers' costs and quality when we review them in the near future.

Author: Kat Orphanides

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