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Lexmark Interpret S405
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Pros
- Fast for both business applications and photos.
- Reasonably high-quality output.
- Standalone fax and copier.
Cons
- Low paper capacity.
- Relatively high cost per page.
Bottom Line
The Lexmark Interpret S405 offers surprisingly fast speed, more than acceptable output quality, and AIO features aimed at both home and home office use.
As one of the MFPs (aka all-in-ones, or AIOs) in Lexmark's new Home Office series, the Lexmark Interpret S405 ($129 direct) is by definition aimed at home offices. In fact, I'd argue it's the most capable home office printer in the batch—for reasons I'll get to shortly. Along with the rest of the series, however, it offers photocentric features of interest for home use too, which also makes it a good choice for the dual role of home and home office printer.
The other three printers currently in the series are the
All 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. 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. All four also print, scan, and copy. Beyond that, the features vary, with no one model offering every feature.
The S405 is only model that adds faxing—standalone faxing as well as faxing files along with optional cover pages from your PC. 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 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. However, the 100-page input tray still limits it to light-duty use. 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. If you generally go through 20 or fewer pages per day, however, that won't be an issue.
Setup
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. 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. Fortunately, installation is a one-time thing, making this only a minor issue.
The setup steps themselves are easy but not entirely straightforward. First find a spot for the 8- by 18.8- by 13.3-inch (HWD) printer, and insert the installation disc in your PC. 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).
After you get the cartridges snapped in, the software installation starts. 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.
For my tests, I installed the printer on a Windows Vista system. According to Lexmark, it also shipped originally with a full set of drivers and software for Vista x64, XP, XP Professional x64, 2000 5.00.2195 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.
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. In addition, Lexmark says you can download a partial set of both drivers and software for a variety of Linux versions.
Speed and Output Quality
One of the more pleasant surprises from the S405 was its speed. On our business applications suite (timed with QualityLogic's hardware and software, www.qualitylogic.com), it turned in a 12-minute 47-second total—extraordinarily fast for the price. As a point of comparison, the directly competitive Editors' Choice
Lexmark Interpret S405 Wifi Setup
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.
More than half of the fonts on our text test qualified as both well formed and highly readable at 6 points. 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. 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. However, it's easily good enough to qualify for most home or business use.
Graphics quality is also good enough for most home or business use. Depending on how much of a perfectionist you are, you may consider it good enough for output going to important clients. 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. You may have to invest in a more expensive, heavyweight paper for graphics, however. With the paper we use in our tests, full-page graphics tended to make the paper curl.
Photos in my tests qualified as true photo quality, but at the low end of the scale. A black-and-white photo showed obvious tints at some shades of gray, for example, although at a level that some people would consider acceptable. I also saw a flattening effect for apples in a fruit bowl in one photo, which indicates a loss of the subtle shading that gives the eye three-dimensional cues for rounded objects.
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I wouldn't use the S405 for pictures I intended to frame, but its quality is a match for what you'd expect from your local drugstore. The photos also proved to be reasonably water resistant and scratch resistant in my tests. It's unclear how long they'll last, however, since Lexmark doesn't give a rating for photo lifetime.
Warranty
The printer comes with a 1- to 3-year warranty. More precisely, if you don't register it, it's covered for 1 year, but if you register within 90 days of purchase, it's covered for 3 years, with lifetime technical support thrown in—clearly one of the stronger inducements to get people to register a product. Lexmark says that if it can't solve a problem by phone during the warranty period, it will ship a replacement, along with a shipping label for the non-working printer. It's your responsibility to get the printer to the shipper, but Lexmark covers the costs both ways.
The S405 offers a lot of printer for the price, and is a strong competitor to the Epson WorkForce 310, with somewhat faster speed, better text quality, and WiFi. However, it doesn't offer the 310's Ethernet support, and—more important—it claims a notably higher cost per page, at 4.9 cents for a monochrome page and 13.9 cents for a color page, compared with 2.5 cents and 12.3 cents for the 310.
Lexmark Interpret S405 Printhead
The difference translates to $24 in running costs for every 1,000 monochrome pages you print and $16 for every 1,000 color pages. That's enough of a difference to leave the Epson printer as Editors' Choice. However, the S405 is an attractive alternative if you must have the better text quality or the WiFi connection, or don't expect to print enough pages for the difference in running costs to matter.
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BENCHMARK TEST RESULTS
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Lexmark Interpret S405 Software Mac Free
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