Lexmark Prestige Pro805 Cartridge Review

Out of the box, the Lexmark Prestige Pro805 is a monster of a multifunction printer: measuring 25x46.5x39.2cm and weighing in at 9.27kg it's definitely a huge add-on to just about any workspace. Together with the rest of the strangely-titled machines (which include such gems as the Impact, Prevail and Intuition - get us a printer that is intuitive and we are going to eat our hat), the Pro805 is a wireless-enabled device that prints, scans and can even check the weather forecast for you. At a price of around £120, this printer really does amount to a pretty penny, so you need to be sure it is totally capable of delivering your needs just before you spend a wad of cash.

It's for that reason obvious that the Pro805 has a myriad of calling cards, even so the most unusual of these is the 4.3-inch web-enabled touchscreen which takes the place of the classic colour TFT screen at the front of the machine. It is finished in piano black which gives a nice touch to the traditional Lexmark look. With the Smart Solutions interface, you can download applications to run on the printer (including RSS feeds, and one-touch printing for regularly used documents as long as a personal 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 want to connect using a lead there is a USB slot at the back beside the Ethernet port. A novel addition for business people is the scanner's ability to scan business cards and import contact details into a communications program of preference (for instance Microsoft Outlook). There's automated duplexing too. The included ink cartridges are XL (high yield) consisting of three colours - magenta, cyan and yellow - and black. 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, as well as intuitive to use. It additionally provides a nice visual indication (complete with small animated bubbles!) to tell you the present ink tank levels.

This is the place our affection for the machine begins to wane. In our own experience, there is usually an aspect of any printer that proves frustrating, and for the Pro805 it wins the tearing hair accolade for possessing the most fiddly ink tanks. It was not easy to get the cartridges to snap into the printhead.

The speed is also an issue with this printer, taking one minute and thirteen seconds to produce the first page of our standard test document sent via the USB connection, with delay of 10 seconds or more between printing the pages soon after.

On the brighter side, the text quality was quite good at standard 12-point font, although there were some noticeable smudging and banding across text at larger sizes. Print speed was somewhat slow at almost double of Lexmark's claim of 24 seconds for a 10x15cm photo quality print on photo paper. Print quality was acceptable, but nowhere close to lab quality with observable droplets and 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 ink cartridges are to be found here.