Product Reviews

L exmark has been a little quiet of late. Back in the early days of the race for inkjet supremacy, its printers kept pace with Epson's equivalent machines and even threatened to overtake them on occasion. However, until now there hadn't been an update to the company's flagship inkjet printer for over a year. The JetPrinter 5700 (reviewed issue 43, p156) set new standards for budget inkjet printers when it was released and shot straight into the A List, but the intervening time has seen several excellent rivals emerge, most notably the Epson Stylus Photo 750 (reviewed issue 56, p128). Lexmark is hoping that the 5700's replacement, the Z51, will bring it back into the inkjet forefront.

One of the Z51's most powerful weapons is its claimed print speed of 10ppm for text, which is 4ppm more than the Epson 750's. We're used to seeing extravagant claims for print speeds though, and the best we managed for a plain mono document was a disappointing 5ppm in draft mode. This produces reasonable results, but we recommend using the Z51 at its normal setting, which results in even slower speeds of 3.5ppm. It's still much better than the Epson Stylus Photo 750 at 1.9ppm, but it can't match either HP's DeskJet 880C (reviewed issue 56, p130) or Epson's speed demon, the Stylus Color 900. But where the Z51 really shines is with the exceptional quality of its text, which is some distance ahead of its rivals.

Our colour tests were slightly more of a challenge for the Z51, but the results were generally quite good. There's fractionally more banding evident than in the Epson Stylus Photo 750's output, but you have to look very hard for it - in terms of gradation between colours, the Z51 even edged ahead of the Epson 750. For general office use, the quality from the normal 600dpi setting is more than adequate, but again don't expect to achieve the claimed 5ppm printing speed. Even using the draft mode, which produced very washed-out results, the Z51 only reaches 3ppm and output slows to half this speed in normal mode. Using the Z51's highest-quality 1,200dpi setting reduces the printer's pace even further to just one page every two minutes.

It's slightly unfair to judge the Z51 as a photo printer as its three-colour ink cartridge isn't designed for this, but you can upgrade it with the optional six-colour photo cartridge for £30. However, the Lexmark

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produces commendable results with the standard cartridge. It isn't quite as colour-accurate or detailed as the Stylus Photo 750, but it completed our A4 photo test to a standard higher than the HP DeskJet 880C could manage. The Lexmark also took four minutes less than the Epson, completing the test in just eight minutes, 34 seconds.

Speed and quality are the most important part of a printer's performance, but you won't get the best out of the machine if it's hard to use. The Z51 is a bit of a mixed bag in this respect. If you connect the Z51 to the LPT port and follow the simple instructions, you shouldn't have any problems - for example, the printer automatically senses the new ink cartridges and subsequently takes you step-by-step through the head alignment process. But connecting using the USB port is more difficult than it should be. For some reason, the Z51 still wants to believe it's connected to the parallel port and you'll need to delve deep into the printer's properties settings to rectify the situation.

The externals of the Z51 are fortunately more straightforward, with an uncluttered fascia housing only power and eject/load buttons. When the output and input trays are closed, the printer measures a relatively compact 310mm from back to front, and this stretches to 530mm when the trays are fully extended. The Z51's build quality is generally solid too, and it's good to see full width support for paper in the input tray. Too many inkjets neglect this area, providing flimsy, narrow supports that eventually cause paper to curl over in the top corners when left for long periods.

With only two lights on the machine itself, most information is provided by the excellent control panel, which lists the time elapsed and job progress as well as containing buttons to cancel and pause print jobs. It also allows you to clean print nozzles, align cartridges and gives a rough idea of ink levels so you can see when you're about to run out. When the ink cartridges do dry up, there's a button that takes you directly to Lexmark's on-line shop to buy replacements.

A problem with the drivers meant that the printer kept detecting new ink cartridges that we hadn't installed, but assuring it that both cartridges were old seemed to solve this. However, the original problem had the knock-on effect of causing a loss of alignment between the black and colour cartridges, resulting in noticeable colour mismatch. Re-aligning only took a couple of minutes, but it's still annoying and will hopefully be ironed out in future driver releases.

Despite the Lexmark Z51's problems, which don't help it in its battle against the Epson Stylus Photo 750, there's no doubt that it is a worthy, all-round contender. It's able to boast superior text quality, impressive photo output and a reasonable turn of speed. Unfortunately for Lexmark, it needs to produce something a little more special to topple the Stylus Photo 750 from the A List.