Affordable printing for home and education
The most popular printers tend to be all-singing, all-dancing ‘multifunction’ devices with a built-in scanner and copier, and some even have wireless networking and other fancy features.
However, Lexmark has gone right back to basics with the Z2320, it being a good low-cost printer that will appeal to home users on a tight budget.
The Z2320 is a conventional inkjet printer but it costs just £40 and provides good quality for both black and white and colour printing.
Text printing was smooth and detailed and didn’t suffer too much from the bleed that often mars inkjet prints (caused by the liquid inks bleeding into the porous fibres in the sheet of paper).
It was good at producing coloured graphs and charts for school reports and business presentations, and even did quite well with photo-prints.
The Z2320 uses two cartridges to produce colour prints – one cartridge contains black ink, while a second contains cyan, magenta and yellow inks – so it can’t quite match the more subtle tones and textures produced by more expensive printers that use six inks.
Even so, the results are pretty good for a printer in this price range, and the Z2320 can certainly be used to turning out the occasional 4x6 photo print.
The only disappointment – apart from the fact that, as usual, there’s no USB printer cable included with the unit – is that it’s a little on the slow side. Lexmark optimistically claims speeds of 22 pages per minute (ppm) for black and white documents and 16ppm for colour. However, those speeds are achieved by using the low-quality draft mode.
Using the normal quality mode the Z2320 produced about six pages per minute for simple black and white text documents and took a full minute to print a single 4x6 photo print (and twice as long when we printed the same photo on glossy paper using the highest quality setting).
To be fair, though, we wouldn’t expect a printer that costs less than £50 to churn out pages much faster than that. The important factor is that the Z2320 provides good quality printing at a very competitive price. Replacement black ink cartridges cost £14 each (for around 175 pages per cartridge) and £15 for colour (150 pages), so running costs aren’t too bad either.
