The only important flaw I saw in my tests was a tendency to lose thin lines, and even this was less of a problem than with many printers. Depending on how much of a perfectionist you are, you may consider it good enough for output going to important clients. Graphics quality is also good enough for most home or business use. However, it's easily good enough to qualify for most home or business use. As with any inkjet, the text is less crisp than you'll get from virtually any laser, which makes it well short of what you'd want for a resume or other output that needs to look fully professional. One font you might use in a standard business document needed 20 points to qualify as well formed, because of a character spacing issue, but even it passed the highly readable threshold at 5 points. More than half of the fonts on our text test qualified as both well formed and highly readable at 6 points. The output quality was absolutely typical for the breed, with text and graphics quality that matches most other inkjets and photo quality at the low end of the tight range where most inkjets fall. For photos, the S405 averaged 42 seconds for each 4-by-6 and 1:19 for each 8-by-10 on my tests, compared with 2:10 and 5:03 for the 310. As a point of comparison, the directly competitive Editors' Choice Epson WorkForce 310 All-In-One is one of the faster home office printers in the S405's price range, at 14:17. On our business applications suite (timed with QualityLogic's hardware and software, it turned in a 12-minute 47-second total-extraordinarily fast for the price. One of the more pleasant surprises from the S405 was its speed.
In addition, Lexmark says you can download a partial set of both drivers and software for a variety of Linux versions. Lexmark says that if you wind up with the original version of the disc you can download drivers for either of the new OSs from Lexmark's web site, or ask for an updated disc to get the software as well, which Lexmark will provide for no charge.
According to Lexmark, it also shipped originally with a full set of drivers and software for Vista 圆4, XP, XP Professional 圆4, 2000 or later, and Apple Mac OS X version 10.3.9-10.5.x, a list that's now been extended to include Windows 7 and OS X 10.6. I chose a USB connection for my tests, plugged in the supplied USB cable when told to, and then went through the rest of the automated setup.įor my tests, I installed the printer on a Windows Vista system. Then follow the instructions on disc to remove the packing materials, load paper, connect the power cord, turn on the printer, and insert the print head and four ink cartridges (one for each color).Īfter you get the cartridges snapped in, the software installation starts. First find a spot for the 8- by 18.8- by 13.3-inch (HWD) printer, and insert the installation disc in your PC. The setup steps themselves are easy but not entirely straightforward. Fortunately, installation is a one-time thing, making this only a minor issue. I find this more cumbersome than having a printed version to work with, both because I have to keep switching my attention (and swiveling my head) between my computer monitor and the printer, and because it means I can't easily look ahead a few steps as I work.
Setting up the S405 is reasonably typical, except that Lexmark puts the installation instructions on disc, so you have to work through them on your computer. If you generally go through 20 or fewer pages per day, however, that won't be an issue. If the total number of pages you have to print and copy-including incoming faxes-is more than about 20 pages per day, having to continually refill the tray can quickly turn into an annoyance. However, the 100-page input tray still limits it to light-duty use.
The fax capability and ADF together make the S405 the best choice in the series for a home office, since it's a rare office that never has to fax or deal with multipage or legal-size documents. It's also the only one with an automatic document feeder (ADF) to let it scan multipage documents as well as legal-size pages (which are too big to fit on the flatbed). The S405 is only model that adds faxing-standalone faxing as well as faxing files along with optional cover pages from your PC. Beyond that, the features vary, with no one model offering every feature. In addition to connecting by USB cable, all four support WiFi, so you can print to them easily from both your home office and from anywhere else in your house.
Best Hosted Endpoint Protection and Security SoftwareĪll four models share some other features too, including the ability to print directly from PictBridge cameras and memory cards, which is one of the photocentric features that makes them useful as home printers.