Lexmark Z53

Producing a stylish inkjet is proving more difficult than you would first imagine. Both Epson and HP have kept to their standard basic chassis, broadening their horizons with translucent lids, fold-up paper trays and different colours. You might expect Lexmark to follow suit, but its new Z53 sticks to the same old Lexmark formula by looking exactly the same as the Z52 (see Labs, issue 77, p92), and the Z51 (see Labs, issue 67, p98) for that matter. But what did we expect? Lexmark might have been unadventurous with the Z53's aesthetics, but its internal adjustments ought to at least bring improvements in print speeds and maybe more.

Lexmark's recent inkjets have shown a flair for fast and high-quality plain paper text printing, but the Z53 really took the biscuit by completing our draft 25-page letter test in just one minute, 57 seconds, equating to a stunning 12.8ppm (pages per minute). The sheer speed is something to stand back and watch in amazement, as it dramatically sucks the paper into the mechanism and churns out page after page in seconds, and the text quality is still respectable by anyone's standards, even in draft mode.

Just taking the resolution up to the Z53's standard 600dpi mode produces a dramatic increase in print quality as well, outputting sharp black text at a still reasonably quick 5.6ppm. All this is helped along by the Z53's pigmented black ink, which provides almost laser-like precision, producing clean and sharp characters in a deep black. This is nothing new though; Lexmark has long been the inkjet king of black text printing, but has been consistently less impressive in other areas, like colour and photo printing.

The next test was to see how well the Z53 coped with high-resolution colour printing on coated paper, and this is where it started to show its weakness. Unlike the smooth colours from the Epson Stylus Color 880 (reviewed issue 75, p170), the Z53's output was evidently grainy with a distorted composite colour make-up. Both colours and greyscales were accurate enough in terms of basic hue, with no green or brown tinge to the greyscales, but the erratic cyan and magenta speckles detracted from the quality at a closer look, and the same was true with the grainy colour fades.

This grain was also evident on the Z53's photo prints on Kodak photo paper, even at its top 2,400 « 1,200dpi resolution. That said, there was virtually no banding, which marks an improvement over its predecessor's photo results. The colours also look natural, and there's a good colour selection procedure in the driver. This allows you to choose from automatic settings of just black, vivid colour and natural colour. The latter provided the best results for photos, producing genuine-looking colours, and also showed an improvement over the darker photo results from the Z52. But again, while a photo printed on the Z53 will look fine from a distance, as soon as you get close up the grain and composite colour make-up become all too evident.

Then again, if you just want to do occasional colour printing and aren't overly concerned with getting the best photo quality out there, the Z53 will do. It's a fast and high-quality black text printer that can run off huge word documents in a matter of minutes, rivalling the speed of many entry-level lasers. It's also very easy to set up, and supports a healthy mix of old and new OSes. And, as soon as you install the drivers you're automatically taken through the calibration procedure, so you can be sure you're getting the best print quality without wasting too much ink on redundant prints.