Lexmark Z45 Color Jetprinter

This is a color thermal inkjet printer intended primarily for home users. It connects to a standard USB 1.1 port on your PC and comes with an easy reference manual and a driver CD. The operating systems supported are Apple Mac 8.6 or 9.x, and all versions of Windows (except Win NT). It also supports various paper sizes including envelope, A2-A6, banner, etc. This printer has an option to print on both sides of the paper to reduce paper consumption. In this, once it has printed on one side of the page, it prompts you to reinsert the sheet so that it can print on its blank side. The Z45 supports a maximum print resolution of 2400x1200 dpi for both black and color prints. 

We tested this printer for its print quality and speed. It supports four print modes–quick, normal, better and best. In normal mode, it gave the smallest readable font as 2 with no jaggedness. It took 17 secs to print the first page of a multi-page document, while the remaining pages took 13.5 secs, which is quite good. In quality of line art and curves also, it gave very good results in both normal and best modes. In monochrome graphics, it gave some banding in normal mode, but did just fine in best mode. The same was true for a full page color graphic. The printer gave an average print speed of around 9 ppm in quick mode and about 6 ppm in normal mode, which like most inkjets, was lower than rated. Earlier we had reviewed the Canon’s S600, on a Pentium III, 128 MB RAM running on Win 2000 Pro. The printer had a resolution of 2400x200dpi and gave the output of 7.5ppm. So as compared, the Lexmark gave better results.

The Bottom Line: This is a good choice for homes and small offices. The printer is priced at Rs 7927 and comes with two cartridges (black and color). Additional cartridges cost Rs 1670 and Rs 1967 for black and color respectively. The cost per print per page is Rs 3 for black and around Rs 7 for color.

Sukhsagar Prajapati and Varun Sharma at PCQ Labs