Lexmark S405 Cartridge Review

Dressed in frosted black and light grey, the Lexmark S405 continues to have high-gloss streaks, including the top of its entirely horizontal Automatic Document Feeder (ADF). Paper is plucked and rolled from the ADF in a very similar manner as blank sheets are usually picked from a horizontal paper tray.

Blank sheets on this unit still feed through a next to vertical hopper around the back, whilst this specific one has the new development of a little slide, down its right-hand side, that changes the paper guides from A4 to picture papers. The output tray pulls out from the front, along with a steeply raked end, which in turn flicks upwards to catch output pages.

The control panel, with its slightly odd acrylic band over the top, is nicely set out, along with a number pad intended for fax usage and a basic, four-button navigation set which, coupled with its backlit, 2-line by 16-character LCD display, provides excellent control of the unit's applications. Four, silver buttons over the display pick out copy, scan, fax and photograph printing modes.

Same with the new Canon and HP designs,Lexmark has switched to individual ink cartridges with its new Vixiz ink system, with the semi-permanent print heads now not integrated into the cartridges. Although it will need plenty of jottling simply to position the Lexmark cartridges because it would not fit in easily to the head carrier.

The new product range brings a little more realism to print speeds. Lexmark claims 17ppm and 11ppm for black and colour prints, respectively, but we observed 5.36ppm for five pages of black and white text, increasing to 6.78ppm on the longer, 20-page document. The black text and colour graphics print returned a speed of 4.11ppm.

These are actually not poor rates for an inkjet all-in-one, although they are once more extended by the sometimes lengthy processing of pages just before the commencement of print - we experienced 26 seconds in one occasion.

15 x 10cm photograph prints varied from 43 to 52 seconds, which in turn is really impressive for a device within this class. This goes for photograph reproduction, also, even if possibly we'd drop the 'very'. The test pictures showed fine amounts of detail within both light and dark parts of the images and although there was a lesser amount of red than in the originals, this is not as much of a problem as compared to too much red.

Colour on plain paper, as in business graphics, is nice and clean with no noticeable dither patterns and also registration of mono text over colour is superb. A colour photocopy displays a lesser amount of lightening of coloured parts than in some of the machine's competitors, also.

Black text is usually clean, though under a loupe you could view a bit of feathering into the paper fibres and overall print is to a higher quality than from previous Lexmark all-in-ones.

Lexmark S405 printer cartridges happen to be available in two sizes. Significant consumables costs do not have anything to do with print technology, of course, and are strictly a selling choice about exactly how much to charge you regarding the cartridges. Page costs continue to be hidden to most new purchasers and may come as an unpleasant surprise.

This is actually the first of Lexmark's brand new variety of inkjet all-in-ones we have examined and in general improvements are impressive. While ink costs are actually still too high, the further overall economy of single ink cartridges, that means you don't need to chuck a tri-colour cartridge away whenever a single ink is spent, is some compensation. Rates of speed are excellent and print quality is actually enhanced.

Lexmark S405 ink cartridges can be found here.