Good home printer (Lexmark Z65)

Member Name: caz13

Product:	Lexmark Z65
Date:	12/01/05 (286 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Reliable cheap

Disadvantages: Not good with pictures on ordinary paper

I bought this printer for my partner, I thought it looked quite smart and not like his old printer that he had been having problems with. I watched him install the disk that came with the printer in a couple of minutes, the only connections needed to the pc were a simple USB cable and a power cable from the mains. It was very simple from unpacking to having it ready to work. Including putting in the two ink cartridges it must have taken less than fifteen minutes.

It looks good too, it fits nicely on the desk. It only has three buttons on the front, one is the power on/off and the other two are feed buttons for the two paper reserves that sit at the back of the machine.

I was surprised to find out that it can be left switched off and will switch itself on when you print something from the pc. The first time I saw it print I heard the pc say “printing started, printing complete”, that is a nice touch.

The speed it prints is quite fast, although that is not important for me, the quality is great, we use it for printing mainly letters. We have printed a few pictures on ordinary paper, this is not too good as the paper feels wet.

Although we have had it working for nearly a year now we have not had to buy any new ink cartridges, ok we do not print that much but I was still expecting to have used up at least one lot of cartridges so this for me is very economical.

Another thing we have not got round to yet is the other features that you can use this printer for. Addressing envelopes, making greetings cards, making iron on transfers, printing on photo quality paper (I think that this would be much better than ending up with wet paper), posters, double sided printing just to name a few. I guess what has happened to us happens to a lot of home printers, you get used to doing a few letters and printing a few bits off of the internet and that is about it.

Two things that also help us with ink usage is first if we do not need colour then when the print dialogue is opened we select it to print colour images in black and white, this can save a vast amount of the coloured ink especially when we are printing from the internet. Also if the document is not to important we select fast print (draft mode). Both of these really do help to reduce the ink used. I think the cartridges might dry up before we use all the ink.

If I was to think of any moan about this printer, it is quite noisy and although it does not take up a lot of space on the desk the printed sheets come out of the front and because of that when in use it means you need to keep the front clear so in fact it takes up more space than its actual size. But those are only small moans on what is quite a good printer for limited home use.

Summary: