Product Reviews

Anyone tempted to brush inkjets' running costs under the carpet need only take a glance at the Z35. At £55, it seems like an absolute bargain - but wait until you've used the supplied moderate-use black and colour ink cartridges. This will be after 205 pages and 140 pages respectively, according to Lexmark's own figures. You'll then have to buy a new set of cartridges for a total of £54 - just £1 less than the printer itself! Even if you buy just three new sets of each during the printer's life, I worked out that HP's DeskJet 960C (despite its initial £135 cost) works out cheaper.

Still, it's good to see a USB cable included with the Z35 - an unusually generous inclusion for any printer, let alone one that costs less than £60. Mind you, your existing parallel cable won't be any use, as this printer is USB only. We were also impressed by the five-step picture setup guide, which worked perfectly for Windows XP, despite the lack of written instructions. There's no paper manual, but the Z35 is so easy to use that you'll probably never refer to the PDF version anyway.

Experienced users might find the 'Quick Print', 'Normal', 'Better', 'Best' approach of adjusting settings rather simplistic, but the important thing is that it works. Being cynics, we're tempted to suggest that another way of describing the settings is, 'Quite Slow', 'Slow', 'Damnably Slow' and 'Why

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Bother?' Despite Lexmark's claims of 11ppm, a speedy printer this ain't.

Say you want to print five pages of text. In 'Normal' mode, that will take around 90 seconds, or just over three pages per minute. In 'Quick Print' mode, we managed five pages per minute - still less than half Lexmark's claimed speed. And the Z35's claims start to fall apart altogether when faced with graphics. Our one-page report, featuring graphs and diagrams, took over a minute in normal mode, and well over three minutes when we chose Better. Worse still, we had to wait almost 12 minutes for just one page of our photo-heavy newsletter at Best, while an A4 photo emerged after 12 and a half minutes.

We could have forgiven this if the results were worth the wait, but frankly they're not. Starting with the plain text document, we were particularly disappointed by the feathery text in Normal mode, especially as rich, bleed-free text has traditionally been one of Lexmark's strengths. The Z35 coped better when printing our report at the Better setting, with reasonably solid blocks of colour where required, but if you want bleed-free text you'll have to use coated paper - and remember that 12-minute wait.

At first sight, the A4 photo was much more impressive - we'd certainly be happy to frame the results. In fact, hiding the image behind a sheet of glass hides the picture's flaws, with the roller mechanism leaving an imprint behind and dots clearly visible if you look closely. We liked the natural skin tones, though, which is one area where the Z35 beats HP's OfficeJet this month.

Unfortunately for Lexmark, it can't quite match its more serious rival - Canon's S300. This outgunned the Z35 for photo quality, text quality and speed, three of the most crucial areas for any printer. The only area where the Z35 wins is size, as it's even smaller than the S300. But, if quality is more important than ease of use, I think the £35 difference in price is worth paying.