For some reason in my household, we seem to go through printers faster than we go through printer cartridges, I don't know if this is the same for other people, maybe we are just rubbish at looking after printers, I don't know.
What I do know however, is that on my last little trip to the computer shop, I was lucky to find this little baby. I paid £50 for it and in my opinion it is well worth the money.
The reason I bought it was because A) I needed a new printer B) Fancied a scanner for a long time but never wanted to pay out the money for one, and C) Lexmark have never let me down in the past.
The printer itself runs off USB 2.0 but works fine with your normal USB ports, comes complete with manuals (seem to be of a high quality but I never really read too many of them to compare!), the one thing I can vouch for is the online support Lexmark provide for both this printer and all thier hardware, a good website with all the latest drivers and updates for almost everything they make.
The actual printer is an ink jet, the major downside to it is pretty sluggish and resource heavy, ink seems to run out of it like no ones business and no matter how I set up the printer, it constantly takes it time when printing even the smallest document. For me this is fine as I very rarely print pictures from my computer and am in no rush for printouts when I do need to print. But the slowness would drive some people up the wall.
The feeder tray for the printer works great and I have not once had a paper jam in it (A rarity!) it only supports A4 and smaller sized paper, but being honest, if you needed A3, you would be needing a specialised printer anyway, this is for home use and maybe small office use.
Another point that really should be mentioned, this printer is pretty noisey, very noisey compared to some of the ones on the market, this doesn't pose a problem for me, but again, I know some people that would rather write out thier work 500 times than use a noisey printer!
Scanner
A good quality scanner, pretty fast as well, with easy to use software with alot of little things you can do to tweak your image before properly editing it. I cannot remember the exact resolution of scan, but I can assure you, for everyday needs it is more than satisfactory.
Fax Machine
I have never set this function up as I have no use for a fax machine, but from the software given, it seems fairly easy to install it and maintain.
One thing I could imagine being a downside, is as the printer is noisey, if you get a fax from some junk company in the middle of the night, you are going to know about it! And the printers slow speed could also be an issue if using the fax for business use.
Photocopier
This is quite a handy function, it bascially does as it says on the tin, you can select the number of copies you require and it will print them out, again the downfall of the printer is the downfall of this function as well.
Memory Card Slots
The person who thought to add this function needs an award or something, I do not know one person who has never ran out of USB ports when they need to add just one more thing, and with these added, its just one less thing to worry about, the hold the four main sizes of memory card and data transfer is very effecient. Although it is not really needed I should point out for consistencies sake that there is no software provided for this function.
Well that covers just about everything, I hope this review have been informative. All that remains for me to say is that this is a good all in one solution for family computers or perhaps small businesses. And for the price - why not?
How helpful would this review be to a person making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
Very good review. Lexmark printers offer very good value for money. However I think that most of these ink jet ones are a bit of a con. They sell them at below (production cost) price and the fleece you on the replacement cartridges. I think I'll carry on saving the pennies for a good colour laser jet.
very helpful by (93%):
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