Lexmark Ships Bargain Multifunction Device

Low price and convenience offset lack of fax capability.

Dan Littman, special to PCWorld.com

Priced at just $199, Lexmark's first multifunction device, the Z82, costs about half as much as other MFDs. The Z82 combines a color ink jet printer and a color flatbed scanner into a single compact package. At its bargain price, it's a stellar deal--despite a few flaws.

The scanner and printer together can make monochrome or color copies, even when your PC is not turned on. But the Z82 lacks one of the more desirable features found in most office-oriented MFDs: a built-in fax component.

Easy Interface

One of the typical driving forces for small-office owners who are considering purchasing a multifunction device is the opportunity to save space. The Z82 certainly does that: It requires a tiny 15-by-16-inch patch of desk space and stands just 10 inches high.

Setting up the Z82 couldn't be easier. To install ink cartridges, you simply lift the scanner bed and slip the cartridges into the printer carriage. The unit's control panel makes perfect sense, so running the printhead alignment procedure is a snap.

Using the device as a stand-alone copier is simple as well. The control panel has options for selecting monochrome or color copies, quantity, and magnification. You can choose any magnification between 25 percent and 400 percent; the device also offers presets for common reductions such as shrinking a legal-size document to fit onto letter-size paper. Some of the fancier copier functions include reducing an image so that you can print multiple copies on the same sheet (which might be handy for making postcards), and scanning several pages into memory and then collating them when you make multiple copies. The scanner doesn't have an automatic document feeder, so you have to manually place each page on the glass. However, the telescoping lid can accommodate books and other thick items.

Unfortunately, when we used the device as a copier in our tests, the 300-by-600-dpi scanner and 1200-dpi printer didn't produce great output. The print quality was good enough for day-to-day memos and documents, but not up to par with the presentation-quality documents that many single-function ink jet printers in the same price range can deliver. The Z82 didn't copy nearly as fast as an office copier--though Lexmark rates it at 4 ppm in monochrome mode and 1.5 ppm in color mode, it seemed slower than those specs would indicate.

Not-So-Smart Software

Attaching the Z82 to our PC proved less straightforward. The unit supplies both parallel and USB ports, and runs on Windows 95, 98 or Millennium Edition, though not Windows 2000. But the Samsung SmarThru software that Lexmark provides confounded us by demanding that we first install a modem; apparently it assumes that you have a dial-up modem (with its own fax software) that the device can press into service to fax scans. Few people on an office ethernet, or running a digital subscriber line or cable modem at home, are likely to bother with dial-up modems, and the software offers no way to fax using any of those high-speed connections. You can't attach an external modem to the unit, and it doesn't have a network interface, so you must depend on the modem attached to the host PC. Samsung's poorly translated documentation doesn't explain any of this.

We found SmarThru annoying in other ways, too. The software uses separate modules to run the scanner, display scans in a visual database and group them in folders, perform optical character recognition to convert scanned text documents into live text, and spice up scanned images with special effects. But it's often not clear how you access tools, move between modules, or even see at a glance which module you're in at any given moment. Some modules are external applications, while others are part of the SmarThru program. The AnyPage OCR module did a good job converting simple documents, but it can save only in text or in Rich Text Format, which may force Word and WordPerfect users to do some reformatting. Meanwhile, the image editor module is very limited compared with the image editors frequently bundled with scanners.

The Inkman Cometh

Black ink costs 5.2 cents per page and color costs a very steep 19.1 cents using the standard cartridges; those prices fall to 3.4 cents for black and 12.4 cents for color if you buy Lexmark's high-yield cartridges. Even so, prints and copies are pricey--some ink jets approach the Z82's per-page costs, but it's still near the top of the price ladder. Still, the color cost is much less than what you would incur ordering color copies at a service bureau.

One more criticism of the Z82: Its printer quality, like its copier quality, is middling. On ordinary paper, black text looks somewhat grayish and exhibits shadows, while graphics show good color but rough textures. High-quality coated paper doesn't improve the quality as much as it does on most other printers.

All the same, the Z82 provides a lot of capability for a phenomenal price. Unless you need an MFD for external business communication (in which case you should buy one based on a laser printer, such as the Xerox WorkCentre 390, which we reviewed in July 2000), the Z82 offers the best deal you'll find anywhere, and should suffice for dealing with daily office tasks.