Okay, when it worked
Written: Jan 12 '00 (Updated May 19 '00)
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Pros: Easy to set up
Cons: Frequent jams, frequent error messages, broke after a year.
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| Trawma's Full Review: Lexmark Color JetPrinter 1100 InkJet Printer |
.We got this printer over a year ago as a replacement for an old Citizen Dot-Matrix that had served us well. We were very excited--the salesman told us that this was a terrific little printer at a great price, and gosh, we would be so pleased with it.
We weren't. Not really. At 600x600 dpi, the color printing was heavily banded and splotchy. "Photo Quality" was promised (by, what I suspect, was a less than honest salesperson), but definitely not delivered--prints of photos were terrible--banding, streaking, with mottled, cloudy color. Black text printing was good, though there was some banding there, too, and text was sometimes offset. Even when set to best quality on high quality bright white ink jet paper, the print quality was, at best, "okay." In fact, there wasn't a huge difference between Draft Quality and Best.
The Lexmark was easy to set up--basically nothing more than plug and play. It connected to the parallel port, came with a disk with the printer driver, and was ready to go in ten minutes or so.
While the "Ink Manager" feature, which gives a window showing the amount of ink left in the cartridges, was a nice idea, we found out the hard way that it's not very accurate--we ran out of ink in the middle of a job, even though the program told us we were still running at around 40%.
Paper for the Lexmark top loads, and the bin holds around 30 sheets. Paper jams and misloads were a common occurrence, which was a constant source of frustration. Conservatively speaking, I'd say that we got a "no paper" error message 50% of the time. We tried putting fewer sheets in the bin, but that didn't help.
The Lexmark is slow! At 3.5 pages per minute black text and 1.5 pages color, I could hear myself aging while waiting for prints to finish. It's also VERY loud. In fact, I don't think I've ever heard a printer that reached this level of noise. It was very disappointing, and made printing at night impossible, as we have a small child.
The Lexmark came with a standard yield ink cartridge. These cartridges were slightly more expensive than our new HP's cartridges, and, after a few months, became impossible to find in stores, forcing us to order directly from Lexmark online. Another hassle.
Unfortunately (?), two months ago, the printer went south in a big way--all of the mounts for the little springs that hold the paper flush to the roller snapped within 2 days of each other. Now the printer won't advance the paper, i.e., the printer doesn't work. Of course, it chose to break right after we'd forked over $75 for new ink cartridges.
Call me old fashioned, but I expect a slightly longer life span from my printer. My old Dot Matrix worked like a charm for 7 years, and was still trooping along when we retired it. We don't own a home based business, we don't drive the printer mercilessly with page after page of print jobs. We use (used) it once or twice a week, one to two page jobs, usually single color. So, in the final analysis, this printer didn't live up to the hype, and didn't get the job done reliably.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 109.
Operating System: Windows and Macintosh
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Epinions.com ID:
Trawma
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Location: Western U.S.
Reviews written: 389
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