Product Reviews

It seems like every major printer manufacturer is claiming true photo-quality image output from their inexpensive colour inkjets. Lexmark's JP 7000 is the latest contender in this tightly fought marketplace.

While most inkjets remain stuck at resolutions of around 600dpi, the JP7000 has reached an ultra high resolution of 1,200x1200dpi. This compares well with the 1,440x720 dpi printers in the Epson Stylus Color range, which currently have the edge over similar models from Canon and Hewlett Packard when it comes to image quality.

If all peripheral manufacturers took the sort of care that Lexmark does in their installation procedures the world would be a slightly happier place. Once the cables are plugged in, you simply install the driver from the Add Printer dialogue in the Windows 95 control panel. Once installed, it runs the procedure for installing the black and colour ink cartridges, automatically moving the print heads to the replacement position. You then run through a head alignment routine to ensure that the printer is as accurately set up as possible. Within five minutes of getting the JP7000 out of its box it's perfectly reasonable to get it all up and working perfectly

And the work is equally impressive. As you might expect with this resolution, the quality of image reproduction is fantastic. From a complex Corel Draw! depiction of a steam train it produced a highly detailed, smoothly shaded image with no dropped elements or clumsy dithering patterns. The same image from an Epson Stylus Color 600 looks brighter, but otherwise it's hard to fault.

The JP7000 blows the Epsons clean away, however, when it comes to reproducing photo

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images. While the Epson tends to have trouble with bright red tinted colours, or borders between light and dark shades, colour reproduction on the JP 7000 is near perfect, capturing all the subtle tones you would expect in a normal photo. On specialist coated inkjet paper the results are impressive, but perhaps not quite bright enough to fool you that you're looking at a photo. On Lexmark's glossy, heavy media, however, it's a different story. Only a low degree of banding across the print would alert you to the fact that this emerged from an inkjet printer.

It's no slouch for those ordinary day-to-day jobs either. The black text output is among the best I've seen from an inkjet. Most inkjets tend to produce slightly fuzzy text without specialist coated inkjet paper, but not the JP7000. Even on plain, photocopier paper the lettering remains crisp, dark and sharply defined. When compared to the output from most budget laser printers, you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference. The driver makes getting the best out of the JP7000 easy, with a comprehensive set of automatic settings, and nice touches like a print progress gauge and an ink level meter.

Speed is more than adequate. The Lexmark handled a five-page text document in just under two minutes at the default settings, with most pages taking around 20 seconds to emerge. A three-page colour document with embedded graphics took around three-and-a-half minutes. The Corel Draw Train, at full resolution on coated paper, took a mere four minutes to complete, while a full colour A4 photo CD image took just over 15 minutes. Although the Epson Stylus Color 800 is a bit faster, this still compares well with most inkjets on the market.

The JP7000 is a great printer at a very attractive price. The running costs, at 2.1p per page mono and 14p per colour page are acceptable, speed is more than reasonable, and the all-round quality of output is superb. At the price it's good value for money, although those on a tight budget should still lean towards the Epson Stylus Color 600.

If all you want is photo-quality graphics output, there are now better specialist solutions available but, as a great all-rounder capable of top-quality photo reproduction, the Lexmark JP7000 is second to none.