First formed in March 1991, Lexmark posted revenues of $3.45 billion in fiscal 1999. Its products are sold in nearly 150 countries around the world. With more than 65 sales offices globally, eight manufacturing centres on three continents and approximately 11,000 employees, Lexmark's financial success and rapid growth is a result of its unique focus on customer value, customer relationships, service and responsiveness.

The Lexmark Z51 is a solid and sturdy printer with all the necessary items needed to get up and running. Software bundle takes the shape of Corel's Printhouse Magic 4, and driver software on CD Rom. Once the printer drivers are installed, it detects you have installed new ink cartridges and provides the user with the opportunity to calibrate for the best print quality using an alignment sheet. Some fine-tuning is then possible and only takes a few minutes.

The image quality from the Z51 was good on both photo paper and plain paper, with a slight hint of vertical banding, at a claimed rate of 1200 x 1200dpi and the inkdrop size, at seven picolitres, it took some beating from HP, the printer however, was let down on it's performance ratio compared to the other two in the labs.

In our tests the Z51 performed well in the text document section, coming on top by far, the other two tests it faired rather poorly as far as timing is concerned. The text print quality was excellent and difficult to separate from the HP 930c, and the photo quality is further enhanced by the inkdrop size of seven picolitres and the ColourFine 2 printer software for colour management, gives it that extra class, just short of the HP 930c.

Ergonomically Z51 benefits from having a front-loading 100-sheet paper tray and 50 sheets output, bi-directional Parallel and USB ports with a parallel cable supplied. The extra features of the Z51 is impressive, with it's version of Accu-Feed allowing users to print on a wide variety of media, including card stock, and even paper up to 270gsm, the printer driver also displays the cartridge ink level on the screen, also indicating the elapsed time for the current job.

The Z51 performed well in the text arena, and was on par with the others. If you require a basic general purpose Ink-jet than the Z51 is your answer.

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