With this new line of printers, Lexmark has updated their print engine, and it shows. Lexmark claims a draft black print speed of up to 33 ppm and normal black speeds up to 18ppm. They rate color draft at up to 30 ppm and normal color up to 11 ppm. We found that the S605 was speedy enough for most home and home office applications. It was especially speedy at printing photos.
The quality of photos is good. Color representation is also very good. However, you must remember that the type and quality of the photo papers will give different results. Lexmark does make their own paper and the printer is, of course, best paired with the photo paper from the same company. While 4x6” (10 x 15 cm) and 5 x 7" (18 x 23 cm) photos looked great, larger sized photos showed some softening of colors and contrast.
The quality of text documents is good. If you look at the text on good quality paper you will see clean edges and good thickness to the characters.
The Interact uses a four color cartridge system, so you only have to replace the color that you need. The cartridges come in normal or high yield.
You can also print directly from a memory card or a PictBridge-enabled camera, but there are no editing tools available in the printer itself. However, the touch screen interface makes working with photos easy. When you insert a memory card, you will see the simple choice screen shown in Figure 12.
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Figure 12: What to do with photos.
It is easy to select your photos for printing. As shown in Figure 13, the large screen allows you to see six pictures at a time.
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Figure 13: Selecting photos to print.
Scanning and copying on the Interact S605 is easy with the touch screen interface. The scanner has a standard A4 scanning bed. You can scan to a computer, to a memory device, or to email. You can also choose to scan in color or black-and-white. You can copy in black-and-white or color. You can choose photo or normal or draft and you can reduce and enlarge 25% to 400%. Both scanning and copying are quick and quiet.
The S605 comes with a three-year warranty, but that is only good if you register online within 90 days of your purchase. If you don’t register online within that time, your warranty reverts to the standard one year coverage.
