Product Reviews

Lexmark's Jetprinter 5700 may have been on the market for over a year, but its high quality text and graphics have helped it reserve a place in the Computer Buyer Top 50 Best Buys throughout. Now it's time for the old war-horse to retire. So will its replacement, the swankily-named Z51, have such long-lasting appeal?

The Z51 is the first of a whole new range of Lexmark inkjets. As well as the snappier title, the Z51 sports a fresh look that only just stops short of go faster stripes. Its robust body includes a handy USB port, as well as the standard parallel connector. The Z51 is pretty space-conscious too, even with the input and output trays fully extended, it measures a compact 53cm from back to front, and can reduce to a space-friendly 31cm. Despite this diminutive frame, Lexmark claims the Z51 can achieve a maximum print speed of 10ppm for black text and 5ppm for colour. Theoretically, this is 25% faster than both its predecessor and its quickest rival, the Hewlett Packard DeskJet 880C (reviewed March 1999).

However, people who buy this printer expecting 10ppm performance with all their documents will be disappointed. Even in draft mode the best rate we got out of it was 5ppm. The 10ppm claim is stupid because it makes performance seem a let-down, when, in truth, the Z51 is impressively fast at printing high quality text. For instance, at the default 600dpi setting, the printer produced a 25-page plain text document in just seven minutes 38 seconds (the first page arriving

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after 32 seconds). And most importantly, the text quality was better than both the Epson Stylus Photo 750 - which prints at only half the speed - and the similarly paced DeskJet 880C.

The Z51 is no slouch at printing colour either, producing good quality results at speeds of 1.5ppm. You can double this rate by switching to draft mode, but the colours are so washed out it simply isn't worth it. At the other end of the scale, top quality 1200dpi colour printing slows the printer to one page every two minutes, and is only really worthwhile if you are using coated inkjet paper for a professional effect.

We have seen the quality of photo printing steadily increase recently, and the Z51 keeps up with the rest, thanks to its maximum 1,200x1,200dpi print resolution. Image quality certainly won't disappoint the majority of users, but perfectionists armed with magnifying glasses may not appreciate some slight dithering in light areas. To eliminate this visible speckling you'll need to invest a further £30 in the dedicated Lexmark photo cartridge.

During testing the Z51 did encounter a slight problem: the colour cartridge moved around 2mm out of alignment with the black cartridge. This resulted in a gap between the black outline of a drawing and blocks of colour within. Correcting this each time is easy enough thanks to Lexmark's comprehensive printer control panel. As you use this tool, you'll also discover information on the job progress, ink levels and the time elapsed. If you aren't afraid to send your credit card details over the Internet, the control panel even lets you order replacement cartridges online.

According to Lexmark, though, light users shouldn't have to do this too often, with black cartridges lasting for around 600 pages and colour 275. This works out at a reasonable 3.5p and 12.8p per page respectively - which is similar to both the Stylus Photo 750 and the Deskjet 880C.

Without any real weaknesses, it's difficult to deny the Z51 a place in our Top 50 Best Buys. At a street price of just £169 it's a worthy successor to the 5700.