Lexmark Z735 Review

Yeah, Yeah, You Get What You Pay For, But Still ...

When it comes to razors-and-blades marketing, Gillette and Schick are pikers compared to inkjet printer manufacturers, who've built an industry by offering printers at irresistibly low prices, then selling ink cartridges at a higher markup than a hotel-room mini-bar.

We've deplored the practice before, but we can still be swayed by some of the amazing bargains available. And now Lexmark has particularly piqued our interest by introducing the Z735 -- a $50 (no kidding! two for $100!) printer that promises to make maintenance simple enough for the timidest technophobe: Instead of the usual two (black and tricolor) ink cartridges or fancier models' four, six, or more, the Z735 uses only one. What's more, it's easy to shop for because it's Lexmark cartridge number 1, compared to other inkjets' number 35 or 76 or whatever.

The tricolor cartridge mixes cyan, magenta, and yellow to create what print shops call process black, which is never a perfect substitute for real black ink. That said, we think the Z735's word processing printouts look fine for its likely role as a family-room letter-, homework-, and Web-page printer: In our tests, even on cheap copier stock, text in everyday fonts and sizes stood out perfectly well against the paper background.

Charts, drawings, and images with solid black areas, however, revealed the technology's weakness, showing more of a dark chocolate color instead of true black -- and the bargain printer's tendency toward banding or visible lines for each pass of the printhead made things worse.

All There Is To It

Taken out of the box, the blocky Z735 feels as light as a feather -- well, a five-pound feather, but it doesn't feel or sound flimsy despite the back-and-forth bouncing of the printhead. Hardware setup is as simple as lifting the lid and snapping the single cartridge into its carrier, then connecting the AC adapter and USB cables.

Like most other Lexmarks, the printer has a near-vertical paper input tray at the top rear and a pull-out catch tray at the bottom front. The unit's top offers an on/off button and a paper-feed button; if your experience matches ours, you may never need to touch the latter.

Mysteries of global public relations: The American press-kit image of the Z735 plays the family angle, with a picture of the printer producing a grade-school report on turtles.

Our software-setup experience was hampered by our early-production sample's packaging with a CD labeled Lexmark 2300 Series, which did include a "730 Series" driver but also tried to install the scanning, optical character recognition, and other applications of a multifunction printer/scanner/copier (the new X2350, we assume, which uses the same single-cartridge print engine and adds color scanning and copying at a total price of $70).

Lexmark's simple, easy-to-use image editor -- more of an image touch-up program -- ran fine. But, as you can imagine, the Imaging Studio browse-, scan-, and e-mail-photo software we've enjoyed with earlier Lexmark all-in-ones such as the P4350 wouldn't run with the single-function printer.

(Update 8/29/05: Lexmark has confirmed that a handful of first-off-the-assembly-line printers did get X2350 instead of Z735 software CDs, but all current and most initial production boxes contain the right disc.)