Lexmark Genesis multifunction inkjet printer

Lexmark Genesis review: The Genesis is a Lexmark printer that has an excellent scanner but expensive ink

PC World Australia (online)

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The Lexmark Genesis S815 is a multifunction inkjet printer that uses a camera sensor to scan images instead of the moving bar used in conventional flatbed scanners. It's great for scanning since it produces clean and detailed images, but this Lexmark printer doesn't stand out from its competitors like the HP Officejet Pro 8500A Plus in terms of printing speed or quality.

Pros

  • Clean and easy scans for photos and documents, small footprint

Cons

  • Slow printing speeds in Normal quality, loading paper is an ordeal, the upright scanner design is questionable, no automatic document feeder

Bottom Line

The Lexmark Genesis is a multifunction inkjet printer that seems to be more focused on scanning and Web applications than document printing. Its scan quality is good and the design is novel, but we don't like the paper input location and the mediocre print speeds of this Lexmark printer.

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  • Price

    $ 449.00 (AUD)

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Lexmark Genesis: Design and specifications

The Lexmark Genesis has an upright design with the scanning surface angled almost vertically. The scanner has a clip for temporarily attaching documents or photos.

The Lexmark Genesis has an upright tray that can hold 100 pages, but is quite hard to access due to its placement at the printer's rear. The printer is rated to print up to 3000 pages per month, making it appropriate for small business use. The Lexmark Genesis's upright scanner has a resolution equal to a 10-megapixel digital camera — our A4 test scans were reproduced at 2538x3498 pixels.

Lexmark Genesis: Print speed, print quality, scan quality and ink cost

According to Lexmark, the Genesis inkjet printer can produce up to 33 black and 30 colour pages per minute in Draft quality. Our 50 page test document took just under 90 seconds to print in monochrome — right on Lexmark's figure — and a 50 page colour print was produced in 1min 58sec, which is around 26 pages per minute. Draft quality documents are produced quickly but are undersaturated and have occasional banding.

Normal printing quality is significantly slower. We recorded times of 11 pages per minute for black and seven pages per minute for colour, which is slightly lower than Lexmark's claimed figures of 18 and 11. Normal quality document prints are clean and text is easily legible down to 6pt. You can also print in the Lexmark Genesis's Best quality mode at 4800x1200dpi for photos, with good detail levels at the cost of high ink usage and slow operation.

The upright scanner is this Lexmark printer's most notable feature. It uses a CMOS sensor like a digital camera. In our testing we found it produced excellent quality results with a range of content from photos to small text documents. We were able to enlarge a scanned movie ticket stub to near A4 size with no visible artefacting.

The Lexmark Genesis S815 uses Lexmark 100 ink cartridges, which can be purchased in standard or XL size. Standard size black and colour cartridges cost $25 and $16 respectively and yield 200 pages, so each tri-colour page is 24 cents and each black page is 12.5 cents. These prices are quite high, but buying extra large cartridges should drive printing prices down slightly.

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Read more on these topics: Printers, inkjet printers, Lexmark, multifunction printers

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