FREE Lexmark Printers?

TommyWillB

TommyWillB

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Apple is giving away Lexmark Z32 printers for free with the purchase of a new Mac. They also are selling the Z53 for $69.

Anybody have these or know anything about them?
- Are they any good?
- How expensive are the ink replacements?
- Are they loud?
- Do they handle paper smoothly without jamming?

It says they "work with a wide variety of operating systems" but don't mention OS X specifically. Do they work with OS X?


They call them "thermal" ink jets. I remeber the old "thermal" printers that used that odd gray paper. Ug!


My Mom has an old StyleWriter 2500. Are these better/worse/comparable?
 
I received a free lexmark printer with my imac and threw away my epson 580 after comparing the two. First the lexmark doesn't come with X drivers, but you can go to the lexmark web site and download them. The drivers and software that you get work perfectly under X. The ink cartriges are nice & big, so they take a long time to go through (unlike my old epson). The quality of the print can be modified in the print settings, and are comparable to any other low end inkjet. I would have to say, this printer is loud (when printing, not idle) and it slow to print. But the big advantage it has over my epson is Mac OS X compatibility, and it doesn't bring the pages in diagonally or several at once which my epson did all the bloody time! Also, print quality is comparable to your stylewriter. I used to have one of those too!
 
Lexmark is the former printer division of IBM; it was spun off as a separate company ten years ago, and they are well known in the corporate world. They've been in the retail market a couple of years, and I've owned a couple of them. They do a great job on text documents (as close to a laser as I've ever seen), and a decent job on pictures, although Epson beats them all on photographs. Lexmarks are noisier when printing, but they are sturdy printers. They are definitely better than the Stylewriter printers.
 
I just bought a new printer, a Z53 for 129$, and did some research about sub-150$ printers for MacOSX.

I used Epson printers for some time, and still do very much enjoy them. The trouble with some of the newer epson printers is that they dont offer OSX drivers/compatibility. Many Lexmark printers are compatible which impacted my decision.

The Z53 is a very good printer! Its quite fast, and offers very high resolution. It can hit 2400x1200 on any printer media, even plain papers. The quality of the prints is very good on plain paper. Very nice text and graphics.

The biggest problem that I found with the Z53 is the cost of ink... its very expensive. Carts are alot, and the "photo" ink tank is even more expensive.

Of the reviews I read for the z53, they all agreed the ink is too expensive, but was excellent otherwise. Mac Design Magizine gave it a 4.5/5 and said it was an excellent deal at 129$.

You would be getting a "steal" at 69 bucks!
bye and the OSX driver is exclusivly at the lexmark site, not the cdrom disk

bye
 
oh yes I forgot to add that:

lexmark claims that its impossible to jam the printer... I somewhat doubt that but it hasnt yet at least.

Also, it is frigningly loud when it louds paper into range for print. Then it gets alot more quite and soft. Still its somewhat noisy. More so then HP's Ive seen...I still dislike HP. Anyone aligned with compaq must pay!!!

The ink tanks are large too thats true.
 
I got the Z32 Lexmark for free at the beginning of this semester with my iBook. I think it works great .. it's really loud, but it's also pretty fast and dependant. I don't know how long the ink lasts, but I've had it for 2 months of college use and it hasn't shown any signs of running low yet.

I really couldn't be happier with it.
 
The Lexmark that I have got with my iMac works perfectly well with "Classic" (brilliant colors, acceptable speed and everything), but the OS X driver from lexmark.com sucks... I cannot even decompress it. But the file does not seem to be damaged or anything. Don't know what the problem is. Does anyone have an idea what I could do?
 
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