I've always rated HP as being the best for sturdy, reasonably priced printers but, when I got a Lexmark Z32 free with my PC, I embraced the opportunity to try something new.

The print quality was exceptionally good for a budget printer. It was pretty fast for an inkjet (about 9pages per min at full speed) but I did notice, rather alarmingly, that it couldn't print without dancing on the desk and making rather a lot of noise (and when I say a lot of noise, I can remember the days when printers and PCs were more like heavy duty machinary than their modern, desktop counterparts).

Within a few months, things started to go, shall we say, a little pear-shaped. We would get endless blank pages or a fatal error print message. So, I quickly called the helpline, who were at pains to point out that if you refill cartridges yourself, your warranty is null and void (now they tell us). Luckily, we could rule out this as the cause of the problem. To cut a long story short, they eventually sent out an engineer to collect it. No replacement/"hire" printer was forthcoming, but we figured we'd soon have a printer back, good as new. Hah!

It didn't even work when we first tried to test it. Another call to technical help. This time the cartridge belt came off in our hands. A lot of to-ing and fro-ing and we were still without a working printer. During the time that all this had taken (we're now talking months), we were nearing the end of our warranty. Finally they agreed to replace the printer with a newer model, the Z42.

I strongly suspect that there may be a design fault with the Z32, which basically caused the cartridges to bounce out of place. The Z42 is both quieter and doesn't so much as gently sway. The print quality is excellent and it's pretty fast.

My one big bone of contention with Lexmark remains that while you can get relatively inexpensive cartridges for HP, Epson, Canon printers, buy two se
ts of Lexmark cartridges and you could have bought a new printer for your money. And don't even think about refilling your own cartridges or using remanufactured if you are still under warranty and proceed with caution if not.