Product Reviews

Wireless adaptors for inkjet printers have traditionally been expensive extras, but Lexmark doesn't believe this should be the case. Its new range of inkjets aims at the home printing market by introducing wireless as standard. The Z1420 costs just £52, so it may force other manufacturers to lower their prices for the technology.

Ironically, given its main selling point, the Z1420 is that rare thing: a printer that comes with a free USB cable. It's only needed initially to transfer the wireless settings to the printer and after that it can be unplugged. If you do want the option of printing over a wired connection, too, you'll have to run the installation twice to set it up.

Lexmark has reworked its installation wizard to walk you through every step of the setup, so it's easy to get running no matter what your technical ability. When powered up, the wireless symbol on the front glows a variety of different colours to indicate what needs doing to get the connection up and running, so there shouldn't

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be too many problems adding the Z1420 to your existing home network.

Once installed, we had no problems printing our test documents over the wireless connection, which is unsurprising given that the only real bottleneck involved is the speed of the printer itself. As with previous Lexmark inkjets, it isn't the quickest around: it printed our mono test documents at a fairly decent 12ppm in draft mode and 8.8ppm at normal quality, but this fell to less than a page per minute when we moved to colour text and graphics. Text showed slightly rough edges, and the colours in our presentation were a little streaky and pale, but everything remained perfectly legible.

The high-yield black and colour cartridges give low running costs of just 5.8p per page of text and graphics, but for photos you'll need the optional photo cartridge for better quality. The Z1420 is no speed demon with photos, taking over 15 minutes to produce all six of our 6x4in test prints, and nearly five minutes for a single A4 print. Outdoor scenes appeared slightly washed out and a graininess affected all of our test prints, but these are minor niggles that can be ignored when printing your holiday snaps.

Notebook users shouldn't underestimate the ease of being able to print from anywhere in the house without the hassle of wires. Running off a couple of prints from the sofa is remarkably liberating, and we can only hope other manufacturers follow suit in due course. Lexmark's Z1420 is not meant to be an expert photographer's dream partner, but it deserves much credit for providing wireless at such a cheap price.