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Hands-on: Lexmark adds touchscreen to MFP range

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6th Oct 2009
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A sceptical John Stokdyk tries out the bells and whistles that come with Lexmark's new 33ppm multifunction colour inkjet range.

Printer manufacturer Lexmark has introduced an iPhone-like touchscreen control system with downloadable apps for premium models in its new Interact multifunction inkjet printer range. John Stokdyk had a look at the new devices.

While the control system is probably the most eye-catching feature in Lexmark’s new inkjet MFP family, printer nerds will appreciate the engineering tweaks that have gone into its revamped Vizix ink system. The inks are supplied in separate cartridges and feed a print head that is claimed to chew through up to 30 colour pages a minute in draft mode and up to 33 mono pages a minute.
The print system is common throughout the range, available for as little as £99 in the small home/office Impact S305 all-in-one, right up to Professional S805 and S905 models with duplex, paper-feeders, an application to scan business card data straight into your address book and the new touchscreen Smart Solution controls (see image below). When used with high capacity cartridges, the Pro models can print black and white for as little as 1p per page, said Lexmark product marketing manager Tony Lomax.
Wireless networking comes as standard across the range. What differentiates the products are the additional features and functions, so the S405 has a document feeder and fax, while the S505 can print out two-sided pages but has no feeder nor fax.
As part of our introduction to the new Lexmark range, we had a closer look at the Interact S605, a compact home/office duplex model, and equipped with the new touchscreen control system.
Lexmkark’s design team has obviously been paying close attention to the Apple design and interaction model. Not only does it feel like you’re tapping mobile phone icons on the S605, you can also sign into the SmartSolutions website and download apps for your printer.
While we admired the cool factor, Lomax explained that the apps would come out of the user community. Routines created by Lexmark and its channel partners would be published and made available to the entire user community. The apps themselves are still thin on the ground, but ID copy and Photo Reprinting options supplied with the device show what’s possible. Both offer quick step-by-step processes to speed up common scan/print tasks that can easily go wrong if you haven’t done them before.
Conceptually, it’s a brilliant idea and combined with the built in wireless networking changes the rules for those machines that come with more buttons on their control panels than the average airliner flight deck. The printer becomes a more of a smart device itself - one that can poll an RSS stream of Flickr images, download them for viewing on the touchscreen and then print out the ones you want to keep.
In practice, however, there are a few drawbacks from such bleeding-edge technology. Connecting both the printer and PC and configuring the wireless driver took several steps that ate up around a quarter of an hour. Rather than waiting to configure the network, we tried printing direct from a USB memory stick, but that flummoxed the S605 as well. It tried to open and view every image file on the stick before it would print anything, and needed to be connected to a PC with the appropriate driver to output PDF files.
While not quite offering Apple-like ease of use yet, the driver software worked fine once it was installed and we sent off a dark, moody sample page across the wireless network. The printer kicked into life after a few seconds and wrestled with the image for another minute and a half before outputting a very passable copy of the two-sided test image on one sheet.
The image quality was impressive - there were no overlaps or glimpses of white around the edges where green type was reversed out of the dark background image and the black on white type was excellent.
While there were some less convincing tonal areas on the test image we tried on standard photocopier paper, the S605 was transformed when we tried out its photo-handling capabilities. Once it had downloaded images from a USB to the screen, all we had to do was top the desired shots we wanted to print on screen, specify the paper type (photo quality) and push the OK icon.
“With 4,800x1,200 resolution, it’s not designed for photo-specifc printing, but it’s as good as,” said Lomax as we waited for the results. For once, this was a salesman who didn’t lie - the photographs were very vivid and there was no magnifying glass to hand to try and spot any flaws in the reproduction.
It’s worth remembering that all these bells and whistles come from a device priced at £199. Lexmark is better known for its low-cost laser printers and has come under fire in the past for its consumable costs, but it looks as though it has made a strenuous effort to redress these perceptions with its new business inkjet family. The MFPs also come with 3-year warranties for the Soho models (up to and including the S605 tested here), and 5-year warranties for more expensive Professional models.
The range is likely to get a lot more interesting as the SmartSolutions site develops and if you wanted to get just a little bit more colour into your printing life, without stumping up for the cost of a laser device, the S605 is a very tempting alternative.
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