First Look: Hands on with Lexmark's new inkjets

 

Gallery

Posted on 3 Sep 2009 at 17:26

We got an early look at Lexmark's new range of home office and SME inkjets, including the Home Office Interact S605.

With an RRP of £199, it's a compact and attractive-looking MFP with the standard print, scan and copy features. It also has a duplexer that allows you to automatically print on both sides of a page and, like all of Lexmark's new printers, draft-N wireless networking that can be configured without first connecting the printer to your PC.

The front panel is dominated by a 4.3in LCD touchscreen with large, friendly iPhone-style icons. This is the MyTouch, designed to make it easy to access all the printer's key features. We've seen touchscreen printers before, although few have an interface that looks as good as this one.

This is also the first touchscreen inkjet that lets you install extra apps. Modelled on Apple's iTunes App Store, Lexmark SmartSolutions has eleven apps available today, before the printers are even launched. These include photo viewers that allow you to display and print pictures directly from Picassa, PhotoBucket and other online services, scan location shortcuts, an RSS reader and an app to integrate with your Google Calendar account. The apps are all built around Flash, and Lexmark will be encouraging users to create their own.

There are nine new MFPs in the range, starting at £99, which will completely replace all of Lexmark's existing models. They will all use the same print engine, print head, and new Visix individual ink cartridges. This should mean that the entire range will have the same print quality and speeds, and will be differentiated only by their features.

Our initial impressions are favourable. The new inks ??" one pigmented black for sharp printing on plain paper and three dye-based colour inks ??" produced clear document prints and vivid colour photos that suffered from none of the drying problems we're used to from Lexmark's older inks. With the new print head's lower droplet size of 4pl, fine detail and shading is also improved. We'll be reviewing one of the new MFPs in our inkjet group test in Shopper 263.

Author: Kat Orphanides