Home or Business Color Printer

by Bruce Morris
April 1, 1998

I believe the quality of small text has to be to laser standards for a printer to be used for business purposes. The color capability is an added bonus. We found the color quality to be acceptable for enhancing business reports and simple proposals. This is a fine individual business printer and would be great for home use. Lexmark bills it as "best in class ink jet printer for the home." Although it's not a speed demon it is rated at a respectable 8 ppm for black and 4 ppm for color.

Lexmark 5700 Color Jetprinter Estimated Street Price $249, £224 Lexmark International Lexington, KY USA 1 800 LEXMARK Lexmark International Ltd. Westhorpe House Little Marlow Road Marlow Buckinghamshire, SL7 3RQ UK Tel : 01628 481500 Fax : 01628 481894 BBS : 01628 488077 www.lexmark.co.uk Requirements: Windows 3.1, 3.11, 95 or NT 486 PC or better 8 MB RAM Parallel connection

I reviewed the fancy Lexmark Jetprinter PS 4079 in 1995 and it sold then for $3,100. Admittedly it was a higher level printer with Mac and PostScript support and handled large 11x17 paper. It worked quite well but the print quality wasn't quite so good as it should have been and the price was almost ten times what the 5700 Color Jetprinter is selling for today.

The thing with an inexpensive printer is that regular old black on white text needs to print out crisp and sharp with no even slightly visible jaggies at all. If it can print nice color, that's good too. The Lexmark 5700 Color Jetprinter does both quite well, on plain paper, and costs about $230 or £224. The other thing is consumables. Does the printer only really work best with special (expensive) paper? Sure. They all print better with special paper. But will it work well with plain paper and not use up £50 worth of ink cartridges every time you turn it on? Separately changeable black and color cartridges are to be expected.

It looks like I'm going to be able to print out about 100 to 125 pages or so of high coverage color with the color ink cartridge that came with the printer. The black ink, somehow, lasts a lot longer - but color is luxury, man.. I guess the next improvement needed for this type of printers is cheap ink - color still costs too much. Seems like everybody I know with a color printer is always out of ink whenever I need them to print something for me (perhaps this says more about me than ink supply). I found the color to be quite rich and experienced only moderate wrinkling using plain paper. Of course it all looks better on their fancy paper.

A photo-quality cartridge is also available. Our review unit came with one and I have to admit I was keenly anticipating trying it out. I've had a digital still camera for a couple of years and if I could find a good cheap color printer I'd go ahead and buy a real nice digital camera. Buying expensive, fancy paper to run through a review printer is not my idea of the way to do things so I used plain paper to get familiar with the printer. Luckily the review unit came with a sample pack with a nice variety of papers for special use but, get this, they only sent me one sheet of each! Like I said I didn't want to spend on special paper so, when I reckoned I was really ready, I popped in the one sheet of special, super-duper photo-quality paper and clicked on "print". Fortunately the paper is quite thick stuff and, on the second pass, I managed to get it to print on the glossy side - there was no bleed-through from my mistake on the back.

Lexmark claims "up to" 1200 x 1200-dpi-resolution output for both color and black & white. The black and white certainly looks quite good. Now maybe I just don't know as much as I should about how resolution is measured, but the color simply does not look anything close to the black & white quality. The color quality is quite good and much better than I have come to expect from ink jets, but is still nowhere near as sharp as the black & white output.

The paper feeds fine - I had no paper disasters. The printer comes with drivers (3.1, 3.11, 95, NT) tricked out with a little pop-up software program that shows printer progress and ink levels. Watching the color ink level go down reminded me of watching the fuel gauge on my V8 454cc pick up truck. Both go down in a surprising manner. I realize that hard drives are quite cheap now and that no one bitches anymore about how huge programs are and how much drive space they take up. But one of the requirements listed in the Lexmark product description is "20 MB of free space on your hard drive". I can't verify if that's how much space it takes up on my computer and I will allow the possibility that much of that space is for spooling. But that seems a lot of drive space for a printer driver.

For the price, there's no way I can make a list of complaints about the 5700 Color Jetprinter. It just sat on my desk and chugged along as needed and gave me no trouble during the review period. It handled all the weird stuff I could think of to send to it with no more than normal burps. If you can only afford or need one printer, I believe you could do quite well with this one. The black and white output is certainly good enough for home and light business use on plain paper. It's always nice to have color too.

Lexmark 5700 Color Jetprinter
Estimated Street Price $249, £224