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Lexmark Z845 review: Lexmark Z845

For tight budgets where only the occasional printout is needed, the single-function Lexmark Z845 is a good choice. It can't match the feature sets, the print speeds, or the print quality of pricier models, but it's cheap and simple to operate.

Felisa Yang Former CNET Editor
5 min read
If you're a fan of uncomplicated technology, you're sure to appreciate the single-function Lexmark Z845. This $50 printer does nothing more than print. Whether printing text, graphics, or photos, the print speeds and the quality are about what you'd expect from such a low-cost unit: good but not great. Also, you should expect to exceed the cost of the printer in ink refills by your second trip to Staples. But with a limited number of printers in this price range--the only other vendor that still makes such basic printers in this price class is HP--the Lexmark Z845 is one of the few options. And it's a good choice if you don't want to overspend for just the occasional print. For better-quality prints in this price range, check out the $50 Canon Pixma iP1700. If you need additional features such as scanning and copying, be prepared to spend at least $90 to $100 for a low-end multifunction inkjet, such as the HP OfficeJet 4315 or the Canon Pixma MP180.

Design
The Lexmark Z845 is boxy and on the large side for a simple, single-function inkjet printer. It measures 8.5 inches deep, 5.25 inches tall, and 18 inches wide, excluding the input and output trays. The white-and-gray plastic body should easily blend into any standard home office environment. Paper handling is limited to one paper support on the back for input (up to 100 sheets of plain paper) and a tray that pulls out from the front for output, with an extension arm for legal-length sheets. There's no control panel to speak of--just a power button and a paper-feed button.

6.0

Lexmark Z845

The Good

Very inexpensive; decent speeds for the price; a cinch to set up and maintain; Lexmark's Solution Center utility covers lots of ground and is helpful.

The Bad

Print quality is not stellar; large footprint for a single-function printer.

The Bottom Line

For tight budgets where only the occasional printout is needed, the single-function Lexmark Z845 is a good choice. It can't match the feature sets, the print speeds, or the print quality of pricier models, but it's cheap and simple to operate.

Features
The Lexmark Z845 is a single-function printer, which means there isn't much to speak of when it comes to features. The most notable features, in fact, are the bundled software utilities. Lexmark's Fast Pics utility helps you print photos, making the process dead-simple and painless. The utility goes first to your My Pictures folder and lets you check which photos you want printed, choose the paper size, and pick how many copies. You can even perform some minor touchups on your images, including cropping and red-eye reduction. The only drawback is that if you're printing a batch of photos, you have to pick the same number of copies for each. The ability to change the number of prints of each photo seems like a basic feature, and we don't understand why it's missing here.

The Lexmark Solution Center is a cohesive utility that guides you from the basics of setting up the printer to printing tips to projects. It also shows you how to swap out empty ink cartridges and troubleshoot problems, and it provides contact information should you need to get in touch with customer support.

The Lexmark Z845 uses a four-color, two-tank ink system. It ships with the standard-yield black ($18, approximately 175 pages) and tricolor ($19, approximately 150 pages) cartridges, but when it comes to replacing the ink, the high-yield versions are more economical. The 500-page black cartridge costs $25 and the 475-page high-yield color cartridge costs $30. With the high-yield cartridges, your per-page costs work out to about 5 cents for a black page and 6.3 cents for a page of color. These costs are par for the course for inexpensive printers (low initial cost, higher cost of maintenance). For example, the per-page cost for the Canon Pixma iP1700 works out to about 6 cents for a black document and 8 cents for a color document. You can save an additional $4 per cartridge off the price of the standard cartridges by agreeing to Lexmark's Return Cartridge program. You'll get the up-front discount by pledging to return the spent cartridges to Lexmark for recycling or remanufacturing. You can save yet again by signing up to get one free cartridge for every five used ones you return in a 12-month period. For better photo printing, you can replace the black tank with a tricolor photo ink tank ($25) for six-color printing.

Performance
Unsurprisingly, $50 doesn't buy you the world's faster printer, but it held its own against comparably priced competitors and even against slightly more expensive all-in-ones. It printed black text at 6.85ppm, just edging out its competition. It took about 2 minutes (or 0.48ppm) to print a 4x6 photo, which, impressively, is on a par with the more expensive photo printers and all-in-ones we've tested, though it was soundly trounced by the quick-printing Canon Pixma iP1700.

CNET Labs' inkjet printer performance
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
Photo speed  
Text speed  
Lexmark Z845
0.48 
6.85 
Canon Pixma MP180
1.36 
5.81 
Canon Pixma iP1700
0.49 
5.8 
HP OfficeJet 4315
0.49 
4.14 
Note: *The Epson Stylus C88's photo speed is for 8x10 prints. The rest of the printers were tested using 4x6 prints.

The print quality was far from the best we've seen, but again, given the $50 price tag, we're not surprised or terribly disappointed, either. The text doesn't reach the deep black we prefer, and the characters aren't remotely smooth, but overall, the text print is serviceable for printing directions from the Internet or the online article you want to stash away.

Surprisingly, the Z845 turned out a better color graphics print than text print. The color blocks were nicely saturated, gradients were smooth, and it handled bar code graphics better than some of the more expensive machines we've seen. The photo elements were on the ruddy side and looked a bit faded, but overall, the quality was quite surprising for a $50 printer.

Finally, the 4x6 color photographs were not of a quality that you'd want to frame and display on your mantel, but again, they were serviceable. The details could use some sharpening, the colors were a bit washed-out, and we noticed some graininess in flesh tones, but again, you can't expect perfection from a $50 printer. On the other hand, the $50 Canon Pixma iP1700 provides all-around better print quality, though no improvement on text print speeds.

CNET Labs' multifunction printer quality
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
Photo  
Graphics on inkjet paper  
Text on inkjet paper  
Canon Pixma iP1700
Good 
Good 
Good 
Canon Pixma MP180
Fair 
Excellent 
Fair 
Lexmark Z845
Fair 
Good 
Fair 
Epson Stylus C88
Fair 
Fair 
Fair 
HP OfficeJet 4315
Fair 
Poor 
Fair 

Service and support
Lexmark backs the Z845 with a one-year warranty. Free, toll-free phone support is available on weekdays from 5 a.m. to 8 p.m. and on Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. PT for the length of the warranty. Lexmark's Web site includes a knowledge base, downloadable drivers, and a resource center to help get you started on new printing projects.

6.0

Lexmark Z845

Score Breakdown

Design 6Features 6Performance 6Support 6