With all the new printers on the market, it is hard to rise above the fray. Two from Lexmark caught my eye, and in my preliminary tests I give them both high marks. They do very different things, but both are worthy of mention here because of their connectivity options.
The first is one is the $200 P450 photo printer, and it is notable because of what it doesn’t have: a printer cable! Instead, it comes with plenty of other connection options: a CD-burner and various slots to put USB and card media in it. You can copy photos from the removable media and burn CDs, or make 4×6 prints. It takes about three minutes to get a photo-quality print out. It has a tiny LCD screen that has pretty simple menus to navigate around and make your prints.
My initial tests grabbing photos from a Mac were frustrating, and I am not sure that I solved the problem by upgrading to Tiger 10.4 OS. But it now works just fine, taking pictures from a camera directly or by transferring them from either a Mac or a Windows PC via a USB key drive. If you have a lot of digital photos and just want to make a batch of prints, this is the printer for you.
The second printer is the $150 E120n mono laser. What makes this printer noteworthy is that it includes a 10/100 Ethernet print server. I remember the days (and they weren’t all that long ago) when just the print server cost this much. Setup for the printer took all of about 10 minutes, and that included installing the drivers from the CD and unpacking the unit. I also remember when installing Lexmark network print server drivers took the better part of an afternoon, running back and forth from printer to PC, and grabbing different pieces of software to get everything working. Those days are gone: the E120n was a snap to run off either Mac or Windows.
If you aren’t using a mono laser printer at home because of inertia, and you are tired of switching the USB cable between a bunch of PCs and paying through the nose for ink jet cartridges, this is one to look at. It even comes with a built-in Web server to monitor its status and can email you messages when low on toner, something you can impress your friends and neighbors with.