Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Summary: Two great features make this printer worth considering: a penny per page (black ink cost) and ease of use powered by a touchscreen and one button "smartsolutions." Unfortunately, the implementation of these features involves a lot of setup complication, both for smartsolutions and the delicate printhead/cartridge system. Most people will be better off waiting a year or two until the smartsolution ecosystem further evolves and kinks are worked out of the printhead/cartridge mechanism in some future model.
But if you need a printer before then with competitive printing/copying/scanning quality and speed, and you find these extra features attractive, you'll likely be pleased with the Pro805 - once you get past the 2-6 hours setup hassle. Though I'm annoyed at the 5 hours I spent on setup, we like the end result and will stick with the Pro805 for many years.
Details (long):
Usage: This unit is used at home with Wifi, my wife's iMac (10.4), and my Windows XP desktop and netbook. I purchased this all-in-one primarily for my wife, a part-time writer. This replaced a piece-of-junk printer that she used for drafts (which required that she email me final copies or anything long to print at my office on a laser printer).
The penny per page black ink cost is the main selling point - as a writer, my wife prints out frequent black and white drafts. She doesn't want the bulk of a laser printer and she does have an occasional need for color, copying, and scanning. Ease of use also matters, so competent paper handling and the potential of smartsolutions is attractive. It was a birthday gift - so as part of the gift I set it up, including setting up one button smartsolutions appropriate for my wife. But I thought this printer would also be nice for me, as I use Evernote and liked the idea of being able to easily scan in documents and have them show up in my Evernote or Gmail accounts. Printing at home over WiFi is also an added convenience.
Printing Quality - (Note: Most of our usage/testing is Black & White) - The printing quality on draft mode is reasonable. On highest quality mode it is very crisp - you have to look very closely to distinguish from a laser printer. We noticed some stray dots and a little streaking at first but when we selected "clean printhead" from the menu, these issued were resolved. Overall we are very pleased, though we hope we don't have to clean the printhead too often, as ink gets depleted with each cleaning.
Printing Speed - The claimed 33 page per minute printing speed is accurate using draft mode, after the first page is printed. When trying to print after many minutes of inactivity, there is a long period where the printer wakes up and gets ready to print the first page. Given these constraints, a faster way to use the printer is to print a many documents in a row. It prints less than 10 pages per minute in high quality mode, but my wife finds that acceptable.
Ease of Use - WiFi printing works flawlessly - any computer (with the Pro805 driver installed) that is connected to the router (either WiFi or Ethernet) can print. The drivers for both the Mac and Windows are easy to use and offer a vast array of options, including the ability to set up "profiles" (i.e. one profile for quick draft black/white, another for final drafts, another for photos, etc.). The Windows drivers appear to offer a wider array of printing options. The other functions of this all-in-one are also easy to use, whether you use customized one-button smartsolutions, navigate the touch screen, or use the included software on your computer. No paper jams so far and the automatic document feed worked fine in a couple of test cases.
Copying - Have not tested extensively, but Black/White is excellent, color seems pretty good.
Scanning/OCR - The quality of Black/White scanning is excellent. A 15 page scan using the automatic document feeder took just over 2 minutes. The included Abbyy FineReader 6.0 OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software for Windows systems has been 100% accurate so far in converting typed or printed text into text, RTF, or searchable PDF files. To use OCR, you must have your computer turned on and connected to the same WiFi network. Macintosh OCR software is not included, requiring an extra purchase for Mac-only networks that want OCR. Color scanning works, but I don't feel qualified to comment on quality. Scans can be initiated from a computer, from the printer "scan" button, or from a smartsolution. As of March, 2010, the types of scans you can do from a smartsolution are somewhat limited, so you currently need to use the "scan" button or a computer to have access to all possible scanning options.
Email - Documents can be scanned and then emailed, with or without smartsolutions. This is a great feature. I found out the hard way that the printer hangs when attempting to send an attachment that exceeds the limit of the ISP. Comcast is the ISP set up with our Pro805, so the attachment limit is 10MB. A 600 DPI 8.5x11 JPG exceeds this limit (13MB?). And in many instances you will not know if your multi-page PDF file will exceed the limit and hang the printer. The only way to restart the printer after it hangs is to pull out the plug and put it back in.
Smartsolutions - Once set up, these one-button solutions make the printer really easy to use - even a pleasure to use. My favorite smartsolution is "Scan to Email." You can set up one "Scan to Email" to send 300DPI PDFs to your real estate agent for documents you signed and give it a custom name such as "PDF docs to agent." Then set up another "Scan to Email" which emails yourself a 150DPI JPG, etc. The user simply puts the document on the glass, then uses the touch screen to touch "smartsolutions", followed by "PDF to agent"or some other customized "Scan to Email" smartsolution.
An Evernote (a web-based notetaking app) smartsolution particularly intrigued me, but the Evernote smartsolution is basically a limited version of "Scan to Email" which gives you the Evernote Icon but subtracts the ability to have a subject or message. So I just set up a different "Scan to Email" to get things into Evernote and used a subject line with PDF scan @scans to direct the scanned file, called "PDF scan," to go to an Evernote folder called "scans."
Another good smartsolution is "Scan To PDF" which does OCR and saves the file into a specified folder on the computer with the OCR software. This results in a PDF file whose text is searchable and can be copied/pasted. It would be nice if there were similar smartsolutions that allowed scanning to TXT, RTF, and XLS files but that is not the case as of the time of this writing (4/2/10). I would also like to see a smartsolution that allows emailing TXT, RTF, searchable PDF, or XLS files with the touch of one button. Yet another nice feature would be to allow naming the subject of an email from the printer instead of automatically having the same subject name each time.
Overall, I think the smartsolutions idea is great, and is off to a nice start. So long as you have one person in a small office or family who doesn't mind going through all the setup hassles, any printer which supports smartsolutions can be set up to simplify certain complicated, multi-step functions. This will only improve over time as more smartsolutions are rolled out by Lexmark, and possibly outside developers.
Maintenance/Reliablity - My unit has been fully functioning since 3/20/10, so I can't speak to long term reliability. However, from the setup hassles I experienced (see below), it is clear that the printhead and cartridge mechanism is a point of potential failure. All the parts involved are delicate, tricky to install/uninstall, and require cleaning if dirty. Sometimes manually cleaning of the printhead and its insertion point are necessary, while other times a "clean printhead" must be performed by the printer, which depletes ink (the deep clean depletes about 1/8 of each cartridge). Lexmark has a 5 year warranty on the Pro805 so if the printhead experiences problems, they will replace it for free - but I would much prefer not having problems to begin with. I'll update this section in the future after at least a few months of use.
In 2 weeks of use (80-100 pages?), there has been no paper jam or skipped pages, and this includes testing the automatic document feeder and duplex printing. Paper handling has been perfect so far.
Setup: It took over 5 hours to completely setup this printer, and it is complicated by many factors. Configuration settings are spread out between the printer, computer, and smartsolutions website, and sometimes one change involves making a change in two or more of these locations. Here's the detailed breakdown:
1 hour: Minimum required setup for 2 computers (1 Mac, 1 Windows XP). Installing from the CD or the web site is easy enough (though, to be safe, I obtained the Mac driver from Lexmark's web site, bypassing the CD altogether). I installed XP first as I figured Windows XP would be most likely to have a smooth installation. While the software ran smoothly, there were many printer setup steps. Had I not got hung up with a manufacturing defect, it would have taken approximately 1 hour to set up the two computers, including Printer's WiFi, excluding email. Note that setting up computers after the first one is a simple driver installation - only the first is lengthy because the software directs you to set up the printer as well.
3-30 minutes: Email setup. Before you can Email, you need to configure the Pro805 with an ISP. After 20 minutes of trying a bunch of combinations and Googling for help, I gave up trying to get Gmail...Read more›
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Lexmark Prestige Pro805 Small Office Wireless Multifunction Inkjet Printer with Web-enabled TouchscreenLaunch into the next generation of business productivity with the revolutionary Lexmark Prestige Pro805 Small Office Wireless 3-in-1 with Touchscreen. The web-enabled 4.3" myTouch interface improves efficiency by allowing you to create one-touch, custom SmartSolutions for automating repetitive tasks.The myTouch interface also allows you to connect to the web without the need for a computer. Tap an icon to copy, scan, send an e-mail and more. Get the news, view your favorite photo sharing sites, and discover the weather before you step outside, directly from your printer. It's more than a printer, it links you to your world.The Prestige Pro805 also offers the freedom to print from virtually anywhere within the building and the flexibility to print from multiple computers with Wifi-n and Ethernet compatibility.Using our WiFi Protected Setup (WPS), you can sync a printer to a WPS-enabled router wtih the touch of a single button.Included with the Prestige Pro805 are individual, high-yield XL ink cartridges with 3X the pages of standard cartridges.Individual XL inks increase your efficiency, save resources, and lower printing costs.The Prestige Pro805 ships with a special 105XL black ink cartridge, which provides one cent black and white prints, which is a lower cost per page than many laser products.You also have the benefit of Eco Mode, which offers automatic 2-sided printing and energy saving features.The 50 page automatic document feeder easily handles large printing, scanning, copying and faxing jobs.This robust All-in-One also ships with Business Card Scanning software which lets you scan up to eight cards at once. Using optical character recognition (OCR), the software parcels information such as first and last name, employer, address, email and phone and synchronizes it with many popular contact management solutions. All of this functionality is backed by an industry-leading 5 year warranty and lifetime, priority phone support!
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