The most innovative part of this printer is called SmartSolutions. This is a part of the main menu choices shown in Figure 8. SmartSolutions are like miniature Internet applications that run on the printer. The idea is that you can get Internet information to appear on the touch screen and you can also customize your work through these little apps. In order to use SmartSolutions, you need to go to the Smart Solution website on your computer and set up your printer and configure the solutions. While you can use the Solutions on the printer, you must use your computer to get everything setup and to make changes.

We had some difficulty in getting the website to recognize the printer. Getting everything to work required a firmware update as well as some work-arounds. We also had some trouble setting up applications. There was an app that shows you Gmail calendar, but you must know where to go to get the address of your Gmail calendar and the Lexmark documentation doesn’t help you at all. (By the way, you will find the address under HTML in the calendar settings.) When we set up the Smart Solution to display our Picasa pictures, the app kept timing out. Again there was nothing in Lexmark’s documentation to help us. But after some trial and error we found that we could lengthen the time in the applications settings on the computer. Setting the SmartSolutions to display RSS feeds was the only thing that worked the first time we tried it. We were able to get it to display news headlines, weather, and stock prices.

SmartSolutions will also help you automate tasks. They can be set to do repetitive chores like emailing a scanned document to a group and printing forms. You will find that most of the setup for these tasks requires some knowledge of email, networking, SMTP, etc.

There are only a few SmartSolutions available right now and most of them require some research, testing, and time to set up.