Lexmark Prestige PRO 805 printer ink cartridges

The Lexmark PRO805 is a 4 in 1 inkjet printer using four individual ink cartridges. The printer is shipped with standard capacity ink cartridges, the black has a lifespan of 170 pages and the three colour cartridges 200 pages. When replacing these cartridges we recommend purchasing the high yield 100XL version. These are rated to produce three times as many prints, the black 100XL at 510 pages and the colour cartridges at 600 pages. Buying these cartridges will reduce the price of each print produced considerably.

 Lexmark Prestige Pro 805 printer review

Out of the box, the Lexmark Prestige Pro805 is a monster of a multifunction printer: measuring 25x46.5x39.2cm and weighs at 9.27kg it's certainly a sizable element to any office. Alongside the other oddly-titled models (such as gems as the Impact, Prevail as well as Intuition - find us a printer that's intuitive and we will eat our hat), the wireless-enabled Pro805 can, print, scan and even check the weather forecast for you. With its £120 price tag, this particular printer does indeed amount to a lot of money, so you will want to be sure it is entirely tailored to your needs just before you fork out a wad of money.

It's for that reason clear that the Pro805 has an array of calling cards, however the most intriguing feature is the 4.3-inch web-enabled touchscreen display which takes the place of the conventional colour TFT screen at the front of the unit. The sleek piano black finish added a touch of refinement to the traditional Lexmark printer design. The Smart Solutions interface lets you download applications to set up on the printer (such as RSS feeds, and one-touch printing for widely used documents as long as a pc is attached to the printer at the time).

The Lexmark Prestige Pro 805 is equipped with a Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n as well as a standard Ethernet port at the back. A standard PictBridge is set at the front alongside the control panel. At the back, set beside the Ethernet port is a USB cable connector if you don't feel like freeing yourself from cords. A great addition for business people is the scanner's capability to scan business cards and also transfer information in to a communications program of choice (like Microsoft Outlook). There is automated duplexing as well. There are four included ink cartridges, one black and three colours ( magenta, cyan and yellow) all XL (high yield) Paper consumables are loaded from the front of the unit.

The first time we encountered the touchscreen interface is when we set-up the device, and we were really impressed. It's nice and responsive, as well as user-friendly. It also provides a nice visual sign (which has small animated bubbles!) to inform you the existing ink tank levels.

This is where our affection for the printer begins to wane. In our experience, there's normally an aspect of a printer that proves frustrating, and for the Lexmark Prestige Pro805 it wins the tearing hair accolade for possessing the most fiddly ink tanks. It takes a lot of jotling just to fit the tanks into the printhead as it would not snap into position.

It took 1 minute and 13 seconds for the printer to produce the first page of our standard test document which is sent through the USB connection, not fast at all, not to mention the delays of 10 seconds or more between pages afterwards.

Fortunately, text quality with standard 12-point font was fairly good, though at larger sizes there was a small amount of smudging and banding across the text. Print speed was somewhat slow at almost double of Lexmark's claim of 24 seconds for a 10x15cm photo quality print on photo paper. Print quality was reasonable, although nowhere in the vicinity of lab quality having observable droplets and over-saturated colours.

Among the perennial claims of Lexmark is the cheap cost of running their printers that goes down to 1p per page on black text. The Lexmark Prestige Pro805 has four ink cartridges, one black and three individual colour. The best buy is the 100XL cartridges in return program format.