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.

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Does anyone still fax anything? If the proliferation of e-mail, PDFs and online document-sharing hasn't already persuaded many people to stop sending paperwork by fax, maybe this will: Federal officials announced Friday that Hewlett-Packard is voluntarily recalling 451,000 fax machines because of concerns they might catch fire.

"An internal electrical component failure can cause overheating of the product, posing a risk of burn or fire," said the Consumer Product Safety Commission's press release.

HP blamed a problem in the power cord and related components, which under certain circumstances "may result in an overheating event."

The recall involves machines sold under two model names, the HP Fax 1010 and 1010xi, that were manufactured in China and sold from November 2002 to December 2004, at a price of $130 to $150.

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Brother unveiled the first product in its new Professional series of color inkjet all-in-one printers. The MFC-6490CW is targeted at small-business and home-office customers who require the ability to print, copy, scan and fax on paper measuring up to 11 inches by 17 inches.

The device features built-in wired Ethernet or wireless 802.11b/g network interfaces. It has dual paper trays to accommodate both standard 8-inch by 11-inch paper, and 11-inch by 17-inch paper; it can accommodate up to 400 sheets and features an automatic document feeder that can accommodate up to 50 sheets at once. Print speeds register at 35 ppm in black and 28ppm in color.

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Most of the multifunction machines we review come from manufacturers who specialise in printers. Some even buy in the scanner component to make their devices. Sharp, however, comes primarily from the photocopier market and the AR-M201 is an office photocopier which can also print. Printing isn't an afterthought, though, as the machine can print in full duplex, handling both sides of each page in a single job.


The AR-M201 looks rather different from multifunction printers you may be used to. It's quite a bit bigger than most and designed much more like a photocopier than a printer. Paper is loaded sideways in the single 250-sheet tray (a second 250-sheet tray is available as an option). It feeds through the machine from right to left and ends up on an output tray with a large aperture on the left-hand side, so you can remove the finished pages. A50-sheet special-media tray folds down from the right-hand side, giving a total, unexpanded capacity of 300 sheets.

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It's disturbing to see trees being felled to make paper, worse when most of us just print on one side of the sheet. Although duplex printing function is slowly being introduced into more inkboxes, we still have to buy more paper when the tray is empty.

This shouldn't pose a problem for Toshiba which has developed the B-SX8R. This printer can erase the contents on the paper, ready to be printed on again. The revolutionary idea works on the basis that certain mixtures of pigments change color when heated to a particular temperature. This is different from the technology Xerox employed by using ink that fades after a period of time.

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Dell launched three all-in-ones (AIOs) on Tuesday, the V105, V305, and the V305w, the V305's wireless counterpart. Each AIO provides printing, scanning, and copying for consumers and small businesses.

Dell's V105 is a compact and easy-to-use AIO that has document and photo-printing, copy, and scan functionalities. It features a 7-segment LED display, with two illuminated ink low/out indications on the Op panel, and menu screens that Dell says are easy to navigate. It offers borderless photo printing up to 5 by 7 inches, and has a one-touch 4-by-6 photo copy feature. Direct copy allows copying in mono or color. According to Dell, the V105 has a print speed of up 22 pages per minute (ppm) in mono and 17 ppm in color on letter-size paper. Its print resolution is up to 4,800-by-1,200 dots per inch (dpi) and scan resolution is up to 600-by-1,200 dpi.

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Inkjet printing is the only technology that cuts across all the usage categories we look at in this story. Some models are meant for home use, some are aimed at offices, some are meant to print nothing but photos, and some are designed for mobile printing, complete with batteries. Most inkjets are meant as personal printers or, at most, shared printers for printing a few pages per day. The vast majority are small enough to share a desk with the rest of your home or home-office set up.

That said, the technology is showing up in more and more printers meant for heavier-duty printing, including, at the extreme, HP's floor-standing Edgeline models with five-figure price tags. These are very much the exception, however. Many, if not most, inkjets don't even have a published duty cycle, and for those that do, the ratings are laughably low compared with lasers, often measured in a few thousand pages over the lifetime of the printer. The maximum paper capacity in inkjets is often as low as 100 sheets, and rarely more than 300 sheets.

Almost any current inkjet can print photos that at least match the quality you'd expect from your local drugstore. The few exceptions are primarily among printers aimed at offices, but even most office inkjets do a decent job with photos. If you pick carefully, you can find all-purpose inkjets whose output rivals photo printers meant for professional photographers.

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Most printers, including most so-called photo inkjet printers, have one thing in common: They're meant for all-purpose printing—text, graphics, and photos. Some do a better job with some kinds of output than with others, but they aren't designed for one specific kind of output. Dedicated and near-dedicated photo printers are different. They're designed with one goal in mind: printing high-quality photos on photo paper.

In theory, these photo printers can use any technology. In practice, the only two technologies (so far) that offer true photo quality are inkjet and thermal dye (also known by the misnomer "dye sublimation"). Thermal-dye printers use heat to transfer dye from plastic rolls to paper with a plastic coating.

Dedicated photo printers—aimed primarily at home users who want to print their photos with as little work as possible—are easy to spot: You can't use them for anything but photos—practically if not literally. Thermal-dye paper looks and feels like photo paper, so it's useless for standard printing. Also, most dedicated photo printers are limited to small formats, with a maximum paper size of 4 by 6 inches, although some can print 4-by-12-inch panoramas as well. For those who want to print larger photos, a few small-format printers can print at up to 5 by 7 inches.

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You can have the best digital camera on the block, but that won't matter if your prints are no good. The fact is that to get the most out of digital photography, you need to devote as much time to learning about photo printers as you do about digital cameras.

Part of the challenge lies in knowing which photo printer will best suit your needs. Another part is understanding which features that are commonly touted by printer manufacturers really matter.

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Lexmark has a large range of inkjet printers and a larger range of all-in-ones, but the printers often seem to be the same mechanisms dressed up in different cases. The Z2320 is an entry-level device, based on twin, integrated print head and ink cartridges.


Coloured in white and light grey and with a smartly embossed silver Lexmark logo on its top surface, this printer has just one control, a power button. The paper feed tray at the back folds down over the printer's top cover and the output tray slides in underneath the machine, so it can have a very small footprint when it's not actually printing.


At the back are a single USB 2 socket and the plug-in power supply. This is a clever innovation on Lexmark's part, though it has been around a few years, as it enables different power packs to be slotted in for different regional voltage supplies, giving the manufacturer an easy way to change between PSUs. It also saves on lumbering the customer with a cumbersome, cabled power block knocking around on the desk.

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