Customer Reviews

Lexmark Z55 Inkjet Printer

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Okay, so I bought the printer first and then was kinda bored so I decided to look at the reviews for it on amazon.com. I was surprised to see only 1 star as average. I bought the z55 about 3 months ago and I use it at my college dorm for primarily printing reports and occasionally large photos of friends or posters. I have never had trouble with the printer since I've bought it and its actually still working on the same print cartridge with which it started; thats amazing!!!

Now i do admit, the z55 is by no means a godsend, it has its quirks. First, Installation is a pain, yes, and the program that pops up everytime you print tends to freeze. According to my pop up, ive never gotten passed 66% of a print job (although the sheet has actually been printed out). But its easy to deal with, you just close the window when it messes up. For some strange reason my Windows XP Professional is much more stable than other computers with the same OS, so even if the lexmark program freezes, the rest of the computer is fine.
With the paper jam issue: I have had many printers from every company except epson. What I've noticed about lexmarks is that once theres a paper jam and you manually try to tug the sheet out with your hand, thats when you cross the border into printer hell. The printer continues to jam from that point on, or it will suck in more than one sheet of paper when printing, or itll take in the paper at an angle so it crumples at on side. But that has not happened with the z55 yet.

The Pros are all in the job:
The black and white print speed in draft mode is FAST, amazingly fast (yet noisy). And even on draft mode the quality of the print is good enough to be turned in. The text is crisp and the ink dries quickly.
THe color mode is SLOW, and the higher the quality, the slower the print speed. But you have to realize that you are printing at a whopping 2.2 megapixels jammed onto the sheet, thats a lot of dots, and who needs a high quality photo IMMEDIATELY? But once the sheet pops out of the printer is picture bliss, i have yet to see graininess due to the printers dpi. I have to constantly look for high quality images in order to print them out on this printer. Its excellent, the best I've seen so far.

Other than that there are some nice quirks like the printer turns off automatically when you turn the computer off and on when you send it a print job, and the pleasant voice that says printing started and printing complete.

All in all, I have really enjoyed the lexmark z55 and would recommend it to anyone looking for high quality color and quick black and white prints. You have to have a technological edge though in order to reap the benefits.

The Lexmark Z55 was advertised as being very fast and easy to use. NOT TRUE! It took several tries to get the software installed, and the printer ran extremely slow, when it did print at all. It would not print at all from DOS, or from other computers on the network. Printing from a DOS program in Windows caused a Windows program to pop up and it seemed to take 'nearly forever' to print a simple directory listing. Even such a simple command as DIR>LPT1: caused the computer to crash.

A tech. support call to Lexmark (NOT a toll-free number!) revealed that this is a 'brain-dead' printer that does not include the printhead driver in its on-board electronics, but instead relies on the host computer to control the printhead. So whenever you print anything, you're tying up your CPU doing what the printer is supposed to do itself!

I do NOT recommend this printer unless you want to 'throw away' half your CPU speed every time you want to print!

For the first few months, this worked like a dream. Then it started misfiring paper and either not printing, printing one line, or printing skewed. Basically, not worth the money.

I bought this printer 6/02 and used approx 500 pages of paper, I simply love it, it prints circles around Epsons and HPs I have had in the past. Black and white printing is blazing fast, on par with mid grade laser printers I've used when printing pages from acrobat and plain text, slower with b/w pictures or any shading. High quality color pictures take time, but look excellent when finished. Works great for T-shirt heat transfers. Both ink cartridges (color and black) are easy to refill if need be, my original cartidges that came with the printer lasted around 5 months....you'll never get that with the "sample cartidges" in HP printers.

The voice can be annoying "Printing started..." especially when late-night printing, but can be easily disabled in the configuration program.

Paper Jams: none yet :)

Granted, I normally don't print from DOS so I don't know of any issues with that as mentioned in a previous post. Also, I don't notice the CPU usage go crazy as mentioned.

I use it with the following:
Windows XP Pro SP1
P4 2.4GHZ with HT
2x256MB Corsair
MSI 865PE Neo2

I've had this since August (5 months) and I have yet to have a problem. It is FAST, the quality is great in both black & color & photo modes. The cartridge lasted 5 months with moderate printing... not bad, but not especially good. Much better deal than the Z65, or any of the HP printers. I would recommend this printer to anyone in my family or any of my friends.

Lexmark has the worst driver support of any printer company I have encountered. Not only are there constant problems, but they have a very annoying 'control program' that pops up every time you print something. Avoid them unless you like headaches.