The Lexmark Prestige is one monster of a multifunstion printer once you first take it out of the box: measuring 25x46.5x39.2cm and weighing 9.27kg it's surely a sizable add-on to just about any workspace. Along with the other strangely-titled models (which include such gems as the Impact, Prevail as well as Intuition - find us a printer that is intuitive and we are going to eat our hat), the wireless-enabled Pro805 can, print, scan and even check the weather forecast for you. Priced at around 120, this particular printer does amount to a pretty penny, therefore you will want to be sure it is completely capable of delivering your needs well before spending a wad of money.
It's thus obvious that the Pro805 has an array of calling cards, however the most intriguing ace up its sleeve is the 4.3-inch web-enabled touchscreen that takes the place of the conventional colour TFT screen at the front of the device. The sleek piano black finish added a touch of refinement to the traditional Lexmark printer design. The Smart Solutions interface will allow you to download applications to set up on the printer (including RSS feeds, and one-touch printing for widely used documents as long as a computer is attached to the printer at the time).
Connectivity? This device comes with a built-in Wi-Fi and a standard Ethernet port at the back. At the front alongside the touchscreen are standard PictBridge connections (though only for SD, Memory Stick, xD and MMC cards). If you don't feel like freeing yourself from cords, a USB slot is available at the back just beside the Ethernet port. A great addition for business people is the scanner's capability to scan business cards and also transfer information in to a communications program of choice (like Microsoft Outlook). There's auto duplexing also. There are four 100XL ink cartridges - black, cyan, magenta and yellow, all of which are available in high yield versions. Paper consumables are packed from the front of the device.
The first time we encountered the touchscreen interface is when we set-up the device, and we were really impressed. It's nice and responsive, and very easy to use. It also gives a nice visual sign (which has little animated bubbles!) to tell you the present ink tank levels.
This is the place our affection for the machine starts to wane. In our experience, there is usually an element of any printer to be frustrating, and for the Pro805 it wins the tearing hair award for possessing the most tricky ink tanks. It was not easy to get the cartridges to snap into the printhead.
This printer isn't particularly fast - with our standard test document sent via the USB connection it took one minute, 13 seconds for the first page to emerge from the printer, with lengthy delays of 10 seconds or more between pages thereafter.
Fortunately, text quality with standard 12-point font was fairly good, though at larger sizes there was a small amount of smudging and banding across the text. Print speed was somewhat slow at almost double of Lexmark's claim of 24 seconds for a 10x15cm photo quality print on photo paper. The print quality was acceptable, but nowhere near lab quality with noticeable droplets and also over-saturated colours.
Among the perennial claims of Lexmark is the cheap cost of running their printers that goes down to 1p per page on black text. The Pro805 ink cartridges consist of one black and three individual colour , for the cheapest prints purchase the 100XL cartridges in return program format.
Lexmark Prestige Pro805 printer ink cartridges can be found here.
