Lexmark Prevail Pro705 Review June 27, 2011 11:37 by Matt Bird

Overview

The Lexmark Prevail Pro705 has a lot to offer the SOHO user, with a good range of features, high capacity cartridges as standard and a large full-colour LCD display. It’s good to see a printer with an Eco Mode button, to remind users to use duplex and light print, wherever possible. Running costs are on the high side though, and the wireless installation routine definitely needs improving.

Ratings

Lexmark Prevail Pro705

Main Review

The sleek and curvy black Lexmark Prevail Pro705 is a well designed home office all-in-one printer, which comes with the advantage of a five-year replacement guarantee. It has a compact, horizontal Automatic Document Feeder neatly placed above a CIS flatbed scanner with a resolution of 4800 x 1200ppi – unusually high. Below this is a 61mm full-colour LCD display, with a generous square of navigation buttons, fax number pad and Eco Mode button. Eco Mode switches the machine to duplex and/or draft print mode. The front feeding paper tray can handle 150 sheets, with printed pages fed onto a pull-out paper support. The front panel has card slots for SD, MemoryStick and xD card printing and there’s a dual-purpose USB socket, with provision for PictBridge cameras and USB memory drives. The back houses sockets for USB, Ethernet, phone line and telephone handset. The machine also support wireless connection and if you can position it close enough to your router to temporarily connect it via the supplied USB cable, that’s the quickest way. It can be quite a longwinded process if you have to do it without this connection. Print speeds are compatible with rival machines – in normal mode, the black text speed came out at 3.9ppm and improved to 6.78ppm on the 20-page document. A single-sided five-page text and colour graphic document reached a speed of 3.7ppm. Duplexing slows things down, with a 20-side, 10 page document averaging 3.61 sides per minute. Black text quality is impressively clean and shows marked improvements over previous Lexmark SOHO printers. Colour graphics are good – due to the new Vizix ink system, which uses separate cartridges for each colour. The registration of black text over colour is also impressive, although we did spot a slight fuzz on the text characters. Photo prints are very acceptable too, with natural colours and visible detail in the shadows. Colour copies are a different matter, as they are bleached out overall, with areas of under-inking, where paper fibres show through.