Lexmark Prospect Pro 208 Review November 10, 2010 15:36 by Matt Bird
We got our hands on one of the brand new Lexmark Prospect Pro 208 machines entering the market, so have donned our review hats and given it a thorough once over. Our initial reaction?
Starting the Review of the Lexmark Pro 208
Nicely packaged box, free 5 year guarantee written all over the box, Lexmark off to a good s... oh no you ruined it all. What is this? Right inside the box, what is this?
Inside our box, a huge wallet of paper?..... A huge wallet of 450 pages worth of paper....A huge wallet of paper containing 60 pages of English.... 60 pages of English that are not even that useful.
There is one way I can easily sum up how ridiculous the contents of the box are, and it upsets me to write this. There are FOUR A3 double-sided pages, providing guidance in TWENTY-THREE languages of how to insert the power cable and put the installation CD into your pc. See this image for photographic proof!
Frankly Lexmark, this is a disgrace. I almost stopped the review here and sent the printer back but I managed to soldier on with teeth gritted.
Lexmark Pro 208 installation
Luckily the installation actually went quite well and has been streamlined for people like me who love simplicity. Ignoring the raft of downloadable updates already available for the printer (providing me with 10 minutes to simmer over the wasted paper), everything went swimmingly!
Print head in, cartridges in, alignment done, and a pop up screen asking permission to monitor my print usage in exchange for potential discounts!
Review of the Lexmark Pro 208 Print Quality
Quoted speeds up to 33 pages per minute (ppm) were dreamt up by Lexmark for this machine, and in reality this is actually a very slow printer when not using draft mode! However, the print quality of this machine I think makes it worth the wait!
Draft printing
Draft gave a pretty good 12 ppm, and has a nice touch where paper is pulled from the tray whilst one page is still printing! Though you receive the obvious knock to black depth, the quality is still more than good enough for general document printing and will save you a considerable amount of ink. However one issue was highlighted here, a poorly designed document tray.
Pages can get caught, crumpled, go under previously printed pages (a nightmare when printing a 20 page document reliant on page order) and in some circumstances the paper can just shoot out the tray onto the floor. Entertaining, but not a good feature.
Standard printing
Sloooooow. Our Lexmark Pro 208 managed a hefty 4 ppm! If you are not in a rush though, the quality of the print is superb.
Text is surprisingly rich, colours are vivid and even photo prints come out well on standard settings!
A tiny bit of banding was experienced at the end of some full A4 prints, but other than that I really cannot fault it.
The yield of the original Lexmark cartridges was also impressive, with the cartridges outperforming the quoted 500 pages (at 5% coverage) with barely any fading experienced until 5 prints before running dry.
Duplexing is painfully slow at a paltry 2ppm, but there is no degradation of print quality using it and it worked without hassle!
It is also part of a feature that really stands out for this machine -the accessibility of everything. To activate duplex I could either:
- go via the computer in printer properties
- go through the printers clear and well presented menu system
- press the 2-sided printing button on the front of the printer.
One downside of the automatic duplexer is a risk of damaging the machine. The top page is printed and partially fed into the document tray, before being pulled back into the printer for the second side to be printed. If you do not know the page is being duplexed you would think it is a finished print, as one colleague found out when he tried to remove a page from the machine wwhich was halfway through duplexing.
The printer didn't like it, my colleague didn't like it, and I was sure not a fan of the noise the printer made.
Photo printing on the Pro 208
Slooooooooooower! But nearly as fast as duplexing :-)
An A4 print takes 68 seconds to complete, but it is worth waiting for. Colours jump off the page at you, and I have to admit that the greyscale photo prints were brilliant, especially considering the Lexmark Pro 208 only has a single black cartridge.
Though flesh tones and sepia prints are a bit darker than would be ideal (probably avoidable with some fiddling with settings), I would definitely give this printer a thumbs up for image printing.
The quality was good enough that both our tests on originals and compatible lexmark 108 ink cartridges were impressive enough to put up in the office.
Additional Features in the Lexmark 208
The printer menu on the Lexmark is easy to use, and with shortcut keys to all of the major functions (fax, duplex, scan etc) you can easily access anything you need quickly. But... and there's always a but....
I am hoping it was just an issue with the model I received, buy my ink monitor was completely wrong (which I tried to resolve with Lexmark customer support, get your act together, the service was terrible). It showed 60% ink left on the pc, and either 50% or 10% on the printer menu.
The cartridge was in fact empty, but as the printer did not realise this it allowed print requests to go through, giving me lovely blank pages and probably damaging the print head in the process.
This follows on nicely to a very strange option I found whilst rooting around the printer settings, the ability to print black by mixing all 3 colour cartridges.
Considering the printer refuses to let you print when the black cartridge is empty (if the monitor realises it is empty) I cannot think of a single situation you would need this ability.
Combining three colours to make black will result in browny-blacks, severely impacting any image printing you do, and printing work documents will cost a fortune this way.
If any of our readers have an ideas when this would be useful then do let us know!
The Lexmark Prospect Pro 208 Ink Cartridges
Taking the Lexmark 108 ink cartridges, the quality seen in our prints were very good. However we also have in a set of compatible cartridges for this printer, so we took the chance to test these cartridges again and the results were even better than at first thought.
Document printing showed absolutely no difference in quality to the Lexmark originals, and photo prints were brilliant.
Some photo prints experienced the same issue of banding as the Lexmark original cartridges, which hasn't been fixed by print head cleaning, but we are looking into issues with this and the quality otherwise was just as crisp!
Testing the yield of these cartridges is on-going, I have so far printed around 200 pages of approximately 20% page coverage (giving a yield so far of 800 at the industry standard) with no degradation in quality. Now that is value for money.
But would I buy the LexmarkProspect SE Pro 208?
As much as it saddens me to say, a lifetime anti-Lexmark individual, I actually quite rate this printer. Good print quality, very good functionality and interface for the cost, and a fantastic set of compatible cartridges readily available make this a printer I would have to recommend.....
Just don't buy it if you're in a hurry to print!
