Printer Reviews

I wasted a whole bottle of ink trying to refill this thing. I refilled it, waited about 15 minutes, then put it back in the printer. Overnight all the ink leaked out. I got it all over the inside of the printer, me, and even on the floor. It's a special "anti-refill design" by HP. Search the internet well before trying to refill this as it's very difficult.

I have had my Deskjet 540 for over 10 years and it still works great. I'm just glad HP still makes the cartridge for it. How can someone review the cartridge and complain about not being able to refill it. It was not designed for that so why blame the cartridge for it?

I can never let go of my Desk Jet 500 series because I so love this printer cartridge. None like it anywhere in the world. I have three other printers, high-end, and their cartridges don't even come close to giving me the same quality end product.

I wasted a whole bottle of ink trying to refill this thing. I refilled it, waited about 15 minutes, then put it back in the printer. Overnight all the ink leaked out. I got it all over the inside of the printer, me, and even on the floor. It's a special "anti-refill design" by HP. Search the internet well before trying to refill this as it's very difficult.

I have had my Deskjet 540 for over 10 years and it still works great. I'm just glad HP still makes the cartridge for it. How can someone review the cartridge and complain about not being able to refill it. It was not designed for that so why blame the cartridge for it?

I can never let go of my Desk Jet 500 series because I so love this printer cartridge. None like it anywhere in the world. I have three other printers, high-end, and their cartridges don't even come close to giving me the same quality end product.

I have over the years had (and survived) with several different makes/types of low cost printers and hands down this is the worst one I have ever bought. The printer is an especial source of frustration when I am trying to print envelopes. I wanted to like this printer after having mixed results with HP and certainly liked the price, but have regreetted my decision to purchase this product after usi9ng for a couple days.

I used this printer for about 2 years. Adequate print quality and speed for the low price. I became quite frustrated eventually with it because its paper feed mechanism began to jam frequently. It is difficult to clean the friction wheels which are probably the root cause. It seems to me an intrinsic design flaw to have a friction-based paper feed system oriented so that the wheels are exposed enough to collect dust, but not accessible for cleaning.
One major advantage of this printer was the ease of refilling the cartriges - no security code or interior safety pouches or anything to make it tough to do this.

A step up from the Z45. No need to clean and adjust the print cartridges when replaced. It's all automatic!

i don't recommend this Z33 printer. it works for a day and stops to work the next day. i downloaded/upgraded with the newest driver, but nothing has improved.(i am running AMD-XP/win2k/256ram) DO NOT buy Z33. INSTEAD i recommend HP825 which is very stable and similarly priced.

What you see is what you get. I received this printer as a gift and was skeptical for a few reasons. 1. I had gotten a freebie Lexmark with my new Dell 2 years ago (not sure what model but I thought it was a 30 series) and had nothing but problems with the ink drying out too quickly, even with newly purchased ones. 2. I thought that due to the low weight that it must be a piece of... well junk. But hey, it was a gift so what the heck. Thus far, I have had no complaints with this printer. And just as a sidenote, my USB cable was included with the printer. It is not a printer with lots of bells and whistles, but you get what you pay for. What else would you expect?

I bought this printer from QVC because the price was so good. I have had no problems at all with it!!! It does what I push it's buttons to do. I do highly recomend this due to it's price and durability.

I bought this printer 6/02 and used approx 500 pages of paper, I simply love it, it prints circles around Epsons and HPs I have had in the past. Black and white printing is blazing fast, on par with mid grade laser printers I've used when printing pages from acrobat and plain text, slower with b/w pictures or any shading. High quality color pictures take time, but look excellent when finished. Works great for T-shirt heat transfers. Both ink cartridges (color and black) are easy to refill if need be, my original cartidges that came with the printer lasted around 5 months....you'll never get that with the "sample cartidges" in HP printers.

The voice can be annoying "Printing started..." especially when late-night printing, but can be easily disabled in the configuration program.

Paper Jams: none yet :)

Granted, I normally don't print from DOS so I don't know of any issues with that as mentioned in a previous post. Also, I don't notice the CPU usage go crazy as mentioned.

I use it with the following:
Windows XP Pro SP1
P4 2.4GHZ with HT
2x256MB Corsair
MSI 865PE Neo2

I've had this since August (5 months) and I have yet to have a problem. It is FAST, the quality is great in both black & color & photo modes. The cartridge lasted 5 months with moderate printing... not bad, but not especially good. Much better deal than the Z65, or any of the HP printers. I would recommend this printer to anyone in my family or any of my friends.

Okay, so I bought the printer first and then was kinda bored so I decided to look at the reviews for it on amazon.com. I was surprised to see only 1 star as average. I bought the z55 about 3 months ago and I use it at my college dorm for primarily printing reports and occasionally large photos of friends or posters. I have never had trouble with the printer since I've bought it and its actually still working on the same print cartridge with which it started; thats amazing!!!

Now i do admit, the z55 is by no means a godsend, it has its quirks. First, Installation is a pain, yes, and the program that pops up everytime you print tends to freeze. According to my pop up, ive never gotten passed 66% of a print job (although the sheet has actually been printed out). But its easy to deal with, you just close the window when it messes up. For some strange reason my Windows XP Professional is much more stable than other computers with the same OS, so even if the lexmark program freezes, the rest of the computer is fine.
With the paper jam issue: I have had many printers from every company except epson. What I've noticed about lexmarks is that once theres a paper jam and you manually try to tug the sheet out with your hand, thats when you cross the border into printer hell. The printer continues to jam from that point on, or it will suck in more than one sheet of paper when printing, or itll take in the paper at an angle so it crumples at on side. But that has not happened with the z55 yet.

The Pros are all in the job:
The black and white print speed in draft mode is FAST, amazingly fast (yet noisy). And even on draft mode the quality of the print is good enough to be turned in. The text is crisp and the ink dries quickly.
THe color mode is SLOW, and the higher the quality, the slower the print speed. But you have to realize that you are printing at a whopping 2.2 megapixels jammed onto the sheet, thats a lot of dots, and who needs a high quality photo IMMEDIATELY? But once the sheet pops out of the printer is picture bliss, i have yet to see graininess due to the printers dpi. I have to constantly look for high quality images in order to print them out on this printer. Its excellent, the best I've seen so far.

Other than that there are some nice quirks like the printer turns off automatically when you turn the computer off and on when you send it a print job, and the pleasant voice that says printing started and printing complete.

All in all, I have really enjoyed the lexmark z55 and would recommend it to anyone looking for high quality color and quick black and white prints. You have to have a technological edge though in order to reap the benefits.

Please do not buy this printer. You will spend so much money on toner cartridges. Not just because the toner cartridges are expensive, but because the printer needs a new toner cartridge every 400-500 pages. It is terrible. The printer constantly says "Order "K" toner" , then Order "C" toner, then "Order Y Toner", then Order M toner. One day it will show you have 95% toner left, the next day it will say you have only 8% left, "Order Y toner" and you haven't printed a thing. Tech support will tell you to "shake the toner cartridge", well you can "shake it like a polaroid picture" and it won't do any good. Once this printer needs toner, it will not forget about it. The red light will stay on and the display will say "Order Toner". Also, once it determines it needs more toner, that's it, the printer won't print anything. Not even black. Please, take my word for it, stay away from this toner eating machine. You will be sorry at around 400 pages, and you'll get to 400 pages before you know it.

If you plan to install this printer on a network, think twice. Using the latest driver and built-in NIC, even on a fast switched network, you will probably not get the rated 'time-to-first-page' performance. As print jobs are processed at the workstation (no PCL emulation), the time needed for the data to leave the queue and get to the printer can mean an inconvenient wait standing at the printer to grab your pages. Evidently, Oki has known about this for some time.

I gave 2 stars as the web-mgmt interface is pretty good.

Where I work (up to 30 users for these purchases), I was responsible for bringing two C5100N's into the workplace. At the time I purchased them, September 2003, there was little information on them. The goals I had were merely to bring color to the workgroup at a slightly-more- affordable-than-inkjet and definitely more affordable than outsourcing color.

My experience: I agree that the photos aren't the best. They look GREAT (or, much better) on cardstock, and the finished-look of laser gives a more professional look than inkjet, to some extent. The price was right for us, and the results were acceptable for an organization that is used to using a mimeograph for volume color, one color at a time.

Since our emphasis isn't on speed of first output (nobody is really near the printer), the time to first print is not really applicable. Duplex cardstock is an iffy proposition. IF the settings are correct, it should work, and does work.

Consumables are used pretty fast, to be sure. To maintain stock, I've been purchasing up to 4 each C,M,Y,K monthly, and have purchased three sets of imaging drums since September. (I'm supposed to: 21000 images on one printer, and 32000 on the other). The web interface is *great*, and tells anyone who wants to know, what they need to know. I've recently purchased a third unit for another department. Understand that the toners are rated for 5% coverage, so printing 'coated' paper is going to reduce your output significantly.

In all, we have increased our color visibility in ways that we wouldn't have touched either in inkjet or outsourcing. The costs are only of consumables, so we don't have to worry about leasing a color copier. When our user's needs start becoming more toward photo-ready artwork, we'll consider moving to a more advanced model. But when it comes to an Excel Chart or just getting the printout in color, we're pretty happy.

Pro: Workgroup color at a decent print speed, and for what was needed, a good price. Images are fixed on paper. Networkable out of box. Rather decent technical support.

Con: Color is put in distinct points on paper, so no smearing or mixing allowed like inkjet. Slow-ish first page to print, but afterwards makes up for it.

Conclusion: If photos matter, this probably isn't for you. But, if you primarily need clipart, graph, chart, and text color, and want to do some volume of it, this may be a great addition to a workgroup or department.

As soon as I installed the cartridge and used it to make copies or print, the printouts were light and very smudgy. I cleaned the nozzles, but that didn't help. Using the Normal quality setting only resulted in copies that were even more smudgy. I used the cartridge to copy/print approximately 20 pages in Draft. By then the ink was completely gone and the machine wouldn't copy or print any more.

I'll never buy from this vendor again. I'll probably never buy a cartridge by mail order again.

... Xerox has the patents for the cartridge and can therefore charge whatever they like for it. Wish I had known this when I bought the printer. Xerox certainly will not get my repeat business.

Just purchused the Xerox XK50CX and having a great time with the black print cartridge. Still showing full after 30 pages of printing. The best 1200 x 1200 dpi setting produces laser quality letters.

I placed an order a couple of days ago for 2 sets of color and black in for my Epson printer as it was running out of ink. The cartridge packaging looked new and even had an expiration date of 11/2006. The ink cartridges printed as if there were no ink. It was worse than my cartridges that were running out of ink.

I bought one of these about 6 months ago and it's worked just fine. It seems to clog a little more frequently than the original, but as soon as I run the "nozzle cleaner" it works just fine. It's just now running out of ink and I'm happily buying another one.... it works for me and that's all I'm worried about. ^_^

I have used these for years and have had NO problems with them. I also sell them to thousands of customers and have had not one returned or complaint.

It is interesting to note that the two previous ratings that are so negative happened to come from our competitors.

Nice try guys. Be honest it doesn't take a genius to figure this one out.

Great product and it even comes with a 100% money back gaurantee.

the printer gave very good results, but see no need for all the insturction books, (2) that come with the printer. Everything said could surly be condensed to one simple to read and use set of insturctions. there should be a better system to tell what you are going to print before you print it.

This printer is designed for one task- printing 4x6 color images. It's not real fast or real cheap but it is very easy to use and the quality of the prints is comparable to conventional photos. This printer is particularly useful if you use your digital camera as a replacement for a point-and-shoot, and you want to be able to get good, quick prints with a mimimum of fuss. Individual prints are probably more expensive than conventional photos but you don't pay for printing pictures you don't want, so in the end it's probably more cost effective. Compared to ink-jet printers, it's clearly less versitile, but you don't have to remember to load special paper or make special settings, and you won't run out of ink in the middle of a print job, as each paper pack comes with a print cartridge that runs out when the paper does.

This is not an Office printer. It print as good as a 35mm film camera does. Do not expect any thing else. Small paper high cost but best picture that U can get.

This product leaves an ugly yellow stain where the design is "white." You can't wash the yellow out. You can't iron it out. Buy the product made by Hanes.

The quality of the artwork was good, however it leaves an ugly yellow patch where white space should be. This isn't worth the money

I've used this product for about 10 t-shirts, and was impressed with the results! Easy to use, good quality (I didn't experience the yellow effect others mentioned), and REALLY useful for making small lots of personalized t-shirts on short notice. Great personalized gift maker, too. I've only printed B&W, so can't comment on results with colour printing.