We ended up downloading (29MB) and installing the X735 driver from Lexmark's Web site. The driver is certainly helpful, guiding users through tasks such as printing banners or booklets and occasionally playing an audio voice file to announce such news as "Printing complete."

As soon as we started, the driver also popped up damning confirmation of an all-too-common inkjet scam: The ink cartridge supplied with the printer was only half full, and in fact gave us an on-screen "Ink running low, you should buy a new cartridge soon" warning after we'd printed just 38 pages. To be fair, the warning is prematurely padded -- our starter cartridge lasted for a total of 75 pages -- but make no mistake, this printer's consumables will surpass its purchase price within weeks, even though we're sure most owners won't come near its rated duty cycle of 1,000 pages a month.

Not Too Fast, But Not Too Bad

As with virtually every inkjet, you can forget about Lexmark's advertised print speed (up to 15 pages per minute) even in draft mode: Not only is draft output on plain paper almost comically faint or ghostly gray, but it took 14 seconds for our one-page letter and 51 seconds for a five-page, all-text Word document.

Shifting to normal mode but sticking to plain paper, text was sharp enough but dark-grayish rather than black; while you might not notice that with just a glance, banding was easy to see in colorful charts and drawings. The one-page letter took 30 seconds; a 20-page Word document took nine minutes; and a six-page Adobe Acrobat mix of text and graphics took two and a quarter. Trying the best-quality (named Photo) mode halved the speed but didn't much help the plain-paper output.

The German press kit shows a smiling woman who's not only placed the printer facing away from her, but whose boyfriend is about to hurl an apple at her for forgetting the USB cable.

But giving the Lexmark what it wants -- that is, coated inkjet paper -- made such a dramatic difference in output we could almost forgive the extra consumables cost. Our one-page letter took 46 and 86 seconds in normal and best modes, respectively; the former was pretty-good-but-you-can-tell-it's-an-inkjet quality, but the latter was actually business-worthy. Similarly, the six-page PDF still showed some banding (and took 4 minutes and 7 seconds) in normal mode, but was almost critic-proof in photo mode (8 minutes and 8 seconds).

And using photo mode with glossy photo paper left us genuinely impressed: Printing was painfully slow (5 minutes and 10 seconds for an 8 by 10-inch digital-camera image, just over two minutes for a borderless 4 by 6 print), but details were sharp and colors were bright -- maybe a bit short of suitable for framing, but very nearly a match for four- and even six-color inkjets we've tried.

Before this review, we expected that neither a $50 printer nor a three-color printer, let alone one that's both, could be acceptable. But as long as you keep in mind its intended audience of occasional home and schoolwork printers, the Z735 is a pretty good example of rock-bottom-price inkjet technology -- although we must repeat that "cheap to buy" doesn't equal "cheap to own." The first earns the Lexmark a three-star review on our five-star scale; the latter knocks it back down to a two.

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