The Lexmark Z1300 may be one of the least expensive color printers available, but you get what you pay for. This is a surprisingly mediocre color printer, and its consumable costs will consistently hammer away at your budget; in fact, depending on where you buy the ink cartridges, you may spend more on a single tri-color cartridge than you did on the printer itself. Throw in the cost of a black cartridge and you'll certainly pay more than the base cost of the printer every time you replace ink.

The Z1300 ships with only the tri-color cartridge; you'll have to purchase a black cartridge separately. You can swap out the black cartridge for an optional photo ink tri-color cartridge, for one of the cheapest 6-color inkjet printers available.

The Z1300's print speeds were extremely slow when using the out-of-the-box tri-color print system. Lexmark claims 12ppm for black printing when using the normal settings; we think a spec closer to 3ppm is on order, although we didn't actually time it. Color printing was agonizingly slow.

That said, though, we're generally willing to overlook slow speeds if the print quality is worth the wait; unfortunately, we find the Z1300's print quality to be a mixed bag. Black text is generally good, even at small font sizes, although some text is subject to jaggies. Images printed on standard paper tend to be grainy with some banding, but printing on glossy photo paper eliminates most of the graininess and renders banding more difficult to perceive. In fact, the Z1300 is actually a better photo printer than a general-purpose printer.

Connectivity is limited to a single USB 2.0 port. The Z1300 also doesn't offer PictBridge compatibility or card reader capabilities. Paper capacity is limited to a single input tray that can handle up to 100 sheets. There is no output tray; instead, pages exit the printer through a front slot.

The Lexmark Z1300 is one of the cheapest inkjet printers available, but it is a printer that barely lives up to its cost.


Pros: Inexpensive, includes 4- and 6-color printing capabilities
Cons: Expensive ink, doesn't include a black cartridge, text quality is only fair

Warranty
1 year, limited