Author: Anthony Roberts
Editor: Howard Ha
Publish Date: Thursday, August 9th, 2001
Originally Published on Neoseeker (http://www.neoseeker.com)
Article Link: http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews/lexmarkz22/
Copyright Neo Era Media, Inc. - please do not redistribute or use for commercial purposes.
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The Claim Game
The Z22 has some specs that are quite impressive at first glance. With print speeds of 6.5ppm for black, and 3.5ppm for colour, Lexmark has made some bold claims for a printer of this price range. The 1200x1200dpi is also unusually high for a printer at this price, which is something Lexmark is keen on pointing out. Our test unit came with a press package that includes some colour prints on plain (non-photo) paper that would literally blow your mind away – but when we did our own testing using our suite of standard printouts, we found to the Z22 to have both impressive and lackluster qualities in its print performance.
Specifications:
Our speed tests found the Z22 to be one of the slowest text printers we have put through our lab. At 1 minute and 6seconds a page (you can forget about pages per minute right there, and start thinking minutes per page instead), we were literally afraid of putting the printer through a 30 page speed test. The time it took to print text was so different then the specs on the box that we redid our test 3 times on 2 different systems.
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Print quality was a mixed bag – we were pleasantly surprised by the quality on photo paper, and somewhat disappointed in the prints on plain white paper. With that being said, the two main reasons for our disappointment over plain paper printouts was due to the admittedly unrealistic expectations that the press materials had impressed in our minds, and the horribly poor quality of large, dark objects. Overall, the colour prints are acceptable for the price range, with quite noticeable dithering effects in charts, and a lack of crispness and detail on photo prints on plain paper. The real problem with the printer is in its absolute inability to properly print white text on black backgrounds. Large black objects printed out as dark ash with uneven tone throughout. The text on these black backgrounds was all but unlegible in 6pt font. By contrast, regular black-on-white text printouts were quite passable, if obviously well below the quality of even a low-end laser printer.
Colour prints on photo quality paper turned out to be a lot better then we expected. On one image printout the colours were so vivid we thought we must have made a mistake and swapped the print with one from a more expensive colour inkjet. We had mixed reactions for other prints, which ranged from good to fair depending on the amount of dithering and the quality of colour saturation, which varied from print to print.
Quality Counts, But so does Price
The Z22 is by no means a slouch, considering its price. Its print quality is not going to impress anyone, but it delivers as a budget printer and has snappy print times for photos (let’s not even get started about how slow the text printing is). We took a look on the net and found this printer for just a hair under $50US. Inkjet colour printers that we have been looking at until now hover around the $200 range, and a number of printers ranging from the $50 up to $200 dot the market. For a printer at the furthest end of the budget spectrum, the Z22 doesn’t do too badly. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who’s looking to do anything other then make casual prints at home, though, simply because anyone looking to use a printer for professional work or school work should definitely look at a price point that can deliver quality that fits the demands and expectations of those applications.
Overall Score: 73%
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