Lexmark Z645

The market for budget printers is hot with all major inkjet manufacturers bringing in some pretty good printers at unbelievable prices. Lexmark has had some success itself in the budget category, and just recently, they launched 2 new budget printers into the Indian market to further their presence. Does the budget tag affect their performance as well? Lets find out, starting with the Lexmark Z645.

Build
The Z645 comes in a bright red box that seems a bit like the kind Microsoft uses for its PC peripherals, only a lot brighter. The printer itself hasn’t really changed in design since the Z615, but the colors have been changed for the better. Shades of white and gray seems to be the mantra for the new “iPod” generation, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing as the Z645 does look a lot better and cleaner with these new shades.

The build quality of the Lexmark Z645 is not very tough. The plastic body doesn’t give you the feeling of being sturdy in any way and the trays tend to snap off pretty easy too. If the printer is just going to sit on your desk, then this won’t be a problem, but if you intend on carrying it around with you, then look elsewhere.

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With just a single button that does everything on the printer, there isn’t much scope for confusion even for a novice. Ultimately the Lexmark 645 was built to look good, but not be manhandled.
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Performance
There are some printers that cost low enough to be categorized under the ultra-budget desktop inkjet category, but in actual performance, give even the higher-end models a run for their money. The Lexmark Z645 is definitely not one of them. Though the ink colors are bright and lively, the sharpness level is quite low. On prints on glossy photo paper, and at the best print settings, the ink dots were quite visible and the printed image lacked any sense of depth.

Color prints on plain paper come pretty bad and will leave a lot to be desired. If you’re planning to use your desktop to make any kind of presentation related documents or anything that would be distributed to the public, then steer clear off the Z645. This one’s strictly for home printing.

In our font tests, readability was lost after font size 3 and even the bigger sized fonts showed slight ink spillage.

If things are looking bad with this, the speed of the Z645 will really tick you off. On the highest printer settings, each document was printed in approximately 26 minutes, which is more than triple the time most printers take on the same test.

Economy
The printer itself costs around Rs. 2,499*, which sounds like a pretty decent price, but things don’t really look too economical when looking at the bigger picture. The price for the black and color cartridges are Rs. 842 and Rs. 916 respectively, but in our tests the color cartridge needed replacing after only 107 pages, which is the lowest page output we’ve ever seen from any printer. So as you can tell, in the long run the printer is not really going to be very economical with its low print output.

Conclusion
Even with its highly appealing price, it’s hard to recommend a printer that does nothing right, besides look cute. The print quality is just average, the build is cheap and the speed isn’t worth much either.

In a sedated state of mind I’d recommend it as a disposable printer, but I’d repent that too once the long-term cost comes back into perspective.

What I do recommend is getting the Canon iP1200 instead. It give’s much higher quality prints, it’s a lot faster and it did 220 pages in our tests, which is double of what the Z645 did. Moreover, the iP1200 has just dropped its price to Rs. 1,800 making it the best value for money printer in India as of today.

*Update: Lexmark has just informed us that the actual price of the Z645 printer is Rs. 2,499 and not Rs. 1,780 as we were earlier told.

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Lexmark Z645 Technical Specification

| Print Technology
| Thermal Inkjet