Bang/Buck Ratio Shoots Higher with Lexmark
Written: Jun 28 '00 (Updated Jul 09 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Sharp text, accurate color, versatile paper-handling, inexpensive
Cons: Cost of consumables
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| radioguy's Full Review: Lexmark Jet 3200 InkJet Printer |
In a recent issue of Consumer Reports Magazine, I saw a chart showing the components you get nowadays in a typical PC, and the price you'd pay for them, versus what you'd get with a PC in 1994. The differences, especially in certain categories, were staggering. The clear pattern which emerged is that computing power has greatly increased while real prices have dropped.
Take video cards. The typical circa-‘94 card was a One-Meg local bus unit. In one of -today's computers, you'll generally get eight or more Megs of video memory on an AGP card. Hard drives have jumped from a typical size around 500 Megs up to the neighborhood of 10 Gigs. CPU's, which typically ran at 75 Mhz in 1994, are now pushing up to the 700 Mhz and above zone.
The advent of inkjet printers has greatly intensified this trend of more PC performance, bang, if you will, for less bucks. These printers are lightweight, compact, put out black & white text which is almost indistinguishable from the output of a laser printer, and have the added bonus of printing in color.
What is it that allows these printers to do all this at very reasonable prices? It's a one-word answer, just like the guy at the party told Benjamin in The Graduate: plastics. That's right, precision-molded plastic allows mass production of these cheap-but-accurate printers.
A fine example of this is seen with the Lexmark 3200 Color Jetprinter. What surprised me about the Jetprinter 3200 is that the core of the technology is in the printer cartridges, though this is also true of laser printers. Each cartridge, one for black and one for color, has an edging with contact circuits printed onto a flexible ribbon which is glued to the lower-front edge of the cartridge and has 34 contact points. Through these points travel the signals which control exactly how ink will be spit out of each cartridge. The two cartridges ride side-to-side on a carriage-slider mechanism which has similar printed-circuit material that comes in contact with the circuit points on the cartridges. The slider mechanism puts the cartridges over the points where ink is to be spit out.
Thus, the printing process is somewhat akin to the way in which a picture ends up on a television screen: the cartridges slide from side to side, creating one line at a time, similar to the scan lines in a television signal, and the cartridges spit out the right kind of ink at the right point on the line, analogous to the electrical signals which cause a certain screen phosphor to light up in the right color at the right point in a line on the television cathode-ray tube.
The bottom line is that for $100 (manufacturer's list or price for direct purchase from Lexmark Web site) or $70 (sale price at Staples, before the $20 rebate I'm waiting for the sluggish office-supply giant to mail; I'm not holding my breath), you get a high-quality inkjet printer which turns out black & white text pages, with quality similar to that from a laser printer, at the rate of six pages per minute. The color pages are supposed to come out at the rate of 2.5 per minute. Though I didn't test this myself.
Families will love the 3200's color printing and ability to handle many different sizes of paper, including banners. Small business owners will benefit from the professional touch of having not just their correspondence printed out with near-laser text quality, but that same quality on their envelopes as well.
While the initial sale price on the Lexmark 3200 is low, Lexmark's marketing strategy, apparently, is to take a substantial bite out of your wallet when it comes time to replace an ink cartridge, pricing these at around $32 to $38 versus the $25 typical for the ink cartridges for the more popular brands such as Hewlett Packard and Epson. If you're on a tight budget, I'd suggest avoiding doing a lot of color printing and, with your text documents, avoid high point sizes and decorative graphics. Still, at the bargain price this printer sells for, the roughly $10 premium on the ink-cartridge price would take quite a while to catch up to you.
As well as creating good-quality black & white prints, the Jetprinter 3200 also does a decent job with color. Photographs which I printed with the 3200 came out fairly well, although the uneven surface of the standard copy paper onto which I printed caused the output to look a bit uneven and mottled. To know the top quality the 3200 can reach with color printing, I would have had to print onto that slick paper which is specifically designed for this type of printing, and I haven't done that yet. However, I could see the accuracy of the color rendition from the photos and I could see no tonal degradation or inaccuracy. Photos printed from the Jetprinter 3200 won't fool anybody into thinking they were developed by Kodak, but, on the other hand, this printer is not a specialized photo-printing inkjet and these sell for around eight times the price of the 3200 on up.
However, if you're really into doing photos from the 3200, Lexmark sells a special color cartridge which is optimized for photo printing. This cartridge, combined with the special glossy inkjet photo paper, would give you your best shot at approaching photo-quality results. Still, you might be much better off just shooting regular 35-mm photos and having them developed and printed, or burned onto a CD, by a professional lab.
As for the speed of the 3200's color printing, I can attest that, when printing out a modest-sized photographic image (about four-by-five inches), the printer zipped right along, completing the job in well under a minute. The output of this printer is rated at 1200 by 1200 dots-per-inch, though obviously this means nothing like the sharpness of output you'd have from a laser printer at this resolution. But with black & white printing, the text quality is good enough that nobody will notice it's from an inkjet and that's as good as you need for personal and home-office use. On the other hand, if you needed an output printer for camera-ready DTP work, it'd probably be worth it to you to spend the extra cash (and we're talking ten times the expense or more) and get a laser printer.
This little wonder of a printer weighs about ten pounds and sits in a footprint approximately 12 inches deep and 16 inches wide. The various extending paper holders increase this by a few inches. Vertically, the 3200 extends to a maximum height, with the little arm out which holds the paper supply in a vertical position, of about 14 inches.
The 30-volt, 500 mA unit for the Lexmark 3200 takes a slightly different approach from the typical "wall wart" power supply. Instead of having prongs which come out of the side of the box itself, the power supply has a standard two-prong A/C plug at the end of a three-foot cord. Another cord takes the D/C juice from the power unit to the receptacle on the printer itself. This is a great approach, providing the advantages of the typical wall-wart power-supply design with the convenience of a standard cord with a compact plug. The advantage of this type of power supply is that it's self-contained and separate from the main unit and if it dies it's quick, easy, and cheap to replace. However, since 30 volts is a somewhat unusual power supply voltage, Lexmark might be the only source for replacements and able to demand a premium on the power supplies. It looks like the same person created the marketing strategy for both the ink cartridges and the power supply.
Lexmark has designed an attractive folder for the Jetprinter 3200 containing the CD, a quick-start guide, and the manual. I had the drivers installed from the CD, the printer connected to my PC, and a page printed in less than fifteen minutes. For those who want to delve deeper into the workings of the 3200, I salute you, and the brief manual will salute you too, PLUS it covers all the main points of operation, including using the printer with DOS programs. The index will quickly guide you to anything you need to find in the manual. The 3200 has drivers for Windows 3.x, 95, and 98. To print from a DOS application to the 3200, you'll have to use the driver for a Hewlett Packard DeskJet 500C.
One of the neat features of the 3200 is a program which finely aligns the cartridge printheads. This program prints out a test sheet, with a series of sets of lines. By matching the number from the set of lines which line up evenly, you calibrate the printheads to put the ink in the right place at the right time.
At the price of $50 to $80 which this printer ends up selling for after the current $20 rebate, you'd have to count it as quite a bargain and yet another indicator of the ever-increasing values consumers get with PC's.
Recommended:
Yes
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radioguy
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Member: R.U. Experienced
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