Lexmark Color JetPrinter 5700 review

If you really want to get your message across these days you have to print in colour. It's a particular obsession for companies that produce inkjet printers, and every inkjet we see these days is either colour or photo-enabled. Lexmark's latest offering, the 5700, is the first in the company's next generation of photo-capable printers and follows hot on the heels of the excellent 7200 (reviewed issue 40, p168) - a printer that certainly takes pride of place in the PC Pro A List (see p68) as best overall colour inkjet printer.

The 5700 takes much of its core componentry from the 7200: it boasts the same high 1,200 x 1,200dpi resolution and, although it isn't supplied as standard, supports the same photo cartridge. This replaces the black cartridge and contains lighter shades of the standard cyan, magenta and yellow for a more realistic colour range. Lexmark also claims improved print speeds, build quality and paper handling, as well as refined colour matching.

The 5700 feels more solidly built and is a little more compact than the 7200, but testing showed little, if any, improvement in print quality. In customary Lexmark fashion, the 5700 produced superb monochrome output, even on plain 80g/m2 paper. Text characters were crisp and dark with no fuzzy edges at all. In fact, to get any better than this you'd have to buy a laser printer.

Colour output, on plain paper was disappointing: colour bleed, slightly grainy photographic images and a fine degree of banding were all evident on close inspection. HP's latest DeskJet 890C and 720C are both better in this respect. Improve the paper stock, though, and the problems disappear. Using Lexmark's own coated paper resulted in bright colours and extremely sharp detail. Colour matching certainly seems to be improved over the 7200, with greys being more accurately reproduced, but it has the negative effect of losing some greyscale graduation.

Again, the photographic tests showed little difference between the 7200 and the 5700. The 5700 reproduced colours slightly differently, but whether this could be seen as a significant benefit is hard to say. Photographs still look more grainy than images from the HP DeskJet 890C or the Epson Stylus Photo (reviewed issue 35, p153), but this is only noticeable on very close inspection.

Print speed ultimately depends on your PC and what type of job you're printing, but at least the 5700 is quicker than the 7200. Printing a plain five-page text document using the default settings on plain paper took one minute and 57 seconds at 2.6ppm (pages per minute), and in the Quick Print mode, despite Lexmark's rather optimistic claims of a maximum 8ppm, I could only get it up to 4.3ppm.

As I've come to expect from Lexmark, the 5700 is an absolute breeze to install, and the driver software makes the printer extremely easy to set up and maintain. As with all other Lexmark printers, the installation routine automatically takes you through the cartridge installation and head alignment processes on screen. The driver software itself is straightforward and doesn't overwhelm you with too many options. There are preset Natural and Vivid colour settings and, for inveterate tweakers, there are individual settings available.

Since the 5700 uses exactly the same cartridges as the 7200, the amount you pay per print is identical. Based on the manufacturer's figures, you'll pay around 3p per mono A4 page at five per cent coverage, and a colour print will cost more at 14p per A4 page at five per cent coverage per colour. It's not over the top for a colour inkjet, but both figures are slightly more expensive than either the HP DeskJet 890C or 720C.