Well, Lon has read all the drivel on all the websites he could find about inkjet printers and decided to ask Santa for an HP5550 for Christmas to augment the Lexmark, which has taken a sound trouncing from almost all reviewers regarding photo quality. And, Wilhelm slams Lexmark longevity while giving the HP a 73-year rating.
I've had the original "3600 DPI" Lexmark Z55 since March and have had exactly ZERO problems with it. Even refilling carts is a snap, and yes, I've stooped to using cheap refills more than once. Ink is expensive, and PUG folks have a time-honored tendency to be cheap. Grin. Wifey played Santa this year and on Christmas Evening I spent a cheerful FIVE HOURS coaxing the #&*% HP CD-ROM to properly install drivers under Win98. The magic incantation for _this_ particular installation was to uninstall Lexmark, install HP, re-install Lexmark, due perhaps, to both using USB cables. I then printed, on Kodak Premium High Gloss (59 lb), from Elements, a picture of 2 kittens (sharp detail in some fur/whiskers, soft detail elsewhere) using idiot settings: Printer Management, Intent Relative Colorimetric). I'm a fan of idiot settings, BTW. No ICM profiles, monitor calibration with Adobe Gamma only. The HP was using 6 colors in Best Mode, RET. I did not want to force "4800 DPI" printing from it because the spooler crashed several times with the HP, something that has never happened with the Lexmark. The Lexmark was using 3 colors in Best Mode. Both were using OEM inks, and both were fed the full 3600 dpi scan (Gold 100 print film, Adobe 98 workspace, levels and mild unsharp mask courtesy of photoshop 5), sized to "fit the page". Both prints turned out the exact same size, plus or minus some very small fraction of a millimeter. I gave the prints about 20 minutes to dry, labled the back of each one (which printer), and took them out to the kitchen for judgement by wife, 2 sons and myself. We looked at them for about 5 minutes before making selections. Wife, btw, uses Pentax to create fodder for her B&W darkroom, and son #2 is employed in a 1-hour WalGreen photo lab and has a K-1000. All of us picked (gasp) the Lexmark print. Even though one faint pizza wheel mark could be seen if you angled it to the light just right. This was not a color judgement: The colors were about the same in both prints. The Lexmark print appeared to have more contrast and more sharpness. By the way, we did NOT examine the prints with a loupe. What the heck is the point? This may not prove much. One print compared, paper not optimal, etc, etc, etc. But I would have thought, based on what I've read, that the 6-color HP would trounce the 3-color Lexmark on any turf, any shot, any paper. Gonna spend a lot more time the next few days throwing images at both printers. But I know now that I'm not giving the Lexmark away. It spools quicker, is smaller, has a saner paper path, and powers on quicker than the HP. Using the jumbo color cart Lexmark makes available and using third party ink refills, it should be a good proof printer, if nothing else. I'll print to the HP using HP inks and HP Premium Plus paper only when I need longevity, and that's assuming Wilhelm doesn't have his head up his butt as deeply as most of the other "experts". -Lon
