Great printer marred by complex setup
Summary: Two great features make this printer worth considering: a penny per page (black ink cost) and ease of use powered by a touchscreen and one button "smartsolutions." Unfortunately the implementation of these features involves a lot of setup complication both for smartsolutions and the delicate printhead/cartridge system. Most people will be better off waiting a year or two until the smartsolution ecosystem further evolves and kinks are worked out of the printhead/cartridge mechanism in some future model.
But if you need a printer before then with competitive printing/copying/scanning quality and speed and you find these extra features attractive you'll likely be pleased with the Pro805 - once you get past the 2-6 hours setup hassle. Though I'm annoyed at the 5 hours I spent on setup we like the end result and will stick with the Pro805 for many years.
Details (long):
Usage: This unit is used at home with Wifi my wife's iMac (10.4) and my Windows XP desktop and netbook. I purchased this all-in-one primarily for my wife a part-time writer. This replaced a piece-of-junk printer that she used for drafts (which required that she email me final copies or anything long to print at my office on a laser printer).
The penny per page black ink cost is the main selling point - as a writer my wife prints out frequent black and white drafts. She doesn't want the bulk of a laser printer and she does have an occasional need for color copying and scanning. Ease of use also matters so competent paper handling and the potential of smartsolutions is attractive. It was a birthday gift - so as part of the gift I set it up including setting up one button smartsolutions appropriate for my wife. But I thought this printer would also be nice for me as I use Evernote and liked the idea of being able to easily scan in documents and have them show up in my Evernote or Gmail accounts. Printing at home over WiFi is also an added convenience.
Printing Quality - (Note: Most of our usage/testing is Black & White) - The printing quality on draft mode is reasonable. On highest quality mode it is very crisp - you have to look very closely to distinguish from a laser printer. We noticed some stray dots and a little streaking at first but when we selected "clean printhead" from the menu these issued were resolved. Overall we are very pleased though we hope we don't have to clean the printhead too often as ink gets depleted with each cleaning.
Printing Speed - The claimed 33 page per minute printing speed is accurate using draft mode after the first page is printed. When trying to print after many minutes of inactivity there is a long period where the printer wakes up and gets ready to print the first page. Given these constraints a faster way to use the printer is to print a many documents in a row. It prints less than 10 pages per minute in high quality mode but my wife finds that acceptable.
Ease of Use - WiFi printing works flawlessly - any computer (with the Pro805 driver installed) that is connected to the router (either WiFi or Ethernet) can print. The drivers for both the Mac and Windows are easy to use and offer a vast array of options including the ability to set up "profiles" (i.e. one profile for quick draft black/white another for final drafts another for photos etc.). The Windows drivers appear to offer a wider array of printing options. The other functions of this all-in-one are also easy to use whether you use customized one-button smartsolutions navigate the touch screen or use the included software on your computer. No paper jams so far and the automatic document feed worked fine in a couple of test cases.
Copying - Have not tested extensively but Black/White is excellent color seems pretty good.
Scanning/OCR - The quality of Black/White scanning is excellent. A 15 page scan using the automatic document feeder took just over 2 minutes. The included Abbyy FineReader 6.0 OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software for Windows systems has been 100% accurate so far in converting typed or printed text into text RTF or searchable PDF files. To use OCR you must have your computer turned on and connected to the same WiFi network. Macintosh OCR software is not included requiring an extra purchase for Mac-only networks that want OCR. Color scanning works but I don't feel qualified to comment on quality. Scans can be initiated from a computer from the printer "scan" button or from a smartsolution. As of March 2010 the types of scans you can do from a smartsolution are somewhat limited so you currently need to use the "scan" button or a computer to have access to all possible scanning options.
Email - Documents can be scanned and then emailed with or without smartsolutions. This is a great feature. I found out the hard way that the printer hangs when attempting to send an attachment that exceeds the limit of the ISP. Comcast is the ISP set up with our Pro805 so the attachment limit is 10MB. A 600 DPI 8.5x11 JPG exceeds this limit (13MB?). And in many instances you will not know if your multi-page PDF file will exceed the limit and hang the printer. The only way to restart the printer after it hangs is to pull out the plug and put it back in.
Smartsolutions - Once set up these one-button solutions make the printer really easy to use - even a pleasure to use. My favorite smartsolution is "Scan to Email." You can set up one "Scan to Email" to send 300DPI PDFs to your real estate agent for documents you signed and give it a custom name such as "PDF docs to agent." Then set up another "Scan to Email" which emails yourself a 150DPI JPG etc. The user simply puts the document on the glass then uses the touch screen to touch "smartsolutions" followed by "PDF to agent"or some other customized "Scan to Email" smartsolution.
An Evernote (a web-based notetaking app) smartsolution particularly intrigued me but the Evernote smartsolution is basically a limited version of "Scan to Email" which gives you the Evernote Icon but subtracts the ability to have a subject or message. So I just set up a different "Scan to Email" to get things into Evernote and used a subject line with PDF scan @scans to direct the scanned file called "PDF scan" to go to an Evernote folder called "scans."
Another good smartsolution is "Scan To PDF" which does OCR and saves the file into a specified folder on the computer with the OCR software. This results in a PDF file whose text is searchable and can be copied/pasted. It would be nice if there were similar smartsolutions that allowed scanning to TXT RTF and XLS files but that is not the case as of the time of this writing (4/2/10). I would also like to see a smartsolution that allows emailing TXT RTF searchable PDF or XLS files with the touch of one button. Yet another nice feature would be to allow naming the subject of an email from the printer instead of automatically having the same subject name each time.
Overall I think the smartsolutions idea is great and is off to a nice start. So long as you have one person in a small office or family who doesn't mind going through all the setup hassles any printer which supports smartsolutions can be set up to simplify certain complicated multi-step functions. This will only improve over time as more smartsolutions are rolled out by Lexmark and possibly outside developers.
Maintenance/Reliablity - My unit has been fully functioning since 3/20/10 so I can't speak to long term reliability. However from the setup hassles I experienced (see below) it is clear that the printhead and cartridge mechanism is a point of potential failure. All the parts involved are delicate tricky to install/uninstall and require cleaning if dirty. Sometimes manually cleaning of the printhead and its insertion point are necessary while other times a "clean printhead" must be performed by the printer which depletes ink (the deep clean depletes about 1/8 of each cartridge). Lexmark has a 5 year warranty on the Pro805 so if the printhead experiences problems they will replace it for free - but I would much prefer not having problems to begin with. I'll update this section in the future after at least a few months of use.
In 2 weeks of use (80-100 pages?) there has been no paper jam or skipped pages and this includes testing the automatic document feeder and duplex printing. Paper handling has been perfect so far.
Setup: It took over 5 hours to completely setup this printer and it is complicated by many factors. Configuration settings are spread out between the printer computer and smartsolutions website and sometimes one change involves making a change in two or more of these locations. Here's the detailed breakdown:
1 hour: Minimum required setup for 2 computers (1 Mac 1 Windows XP). Installing from the CD or the web site is easy enough (though to be safe I obtained the Mac driver from Lexmark's web site bypassing the CD altogether). I installed XP first as I figured Windows XP would be most likely to have a smooth installation. While the software ran smoothly there were many printer setup steps. Had I not got hung up with a manufacturing defect it would have taken approximately 1 hour to set up the two computers including Printer's WiFi excluding email. Note that setting up computers after the first one is a simple driver installation - only the first is lengthy because the software directs you to set up the printer as well.
3-30 minutes: Email setup. Before you can Email you need to configure the Pro805 with an ISP. After 20 minutes of trying a bunch of combinations and Googling for help I gave up trying to get Gmail (Google Apps version) to work as the ISP. So I setup Comcast as the ISP which took about 1 minute. Passwords for the ISP are bizarrely limited to 14 characters. I use long passwords so was forced to reduce the length of my ISP password to get email working with the Pro805.
1-3 hours: Smartsolutions setup.You can set up as many smartsolutions as you like so this will depend on how many you want to download to your printer. But even if you just wanted to do 2 or 3 one-button smartsolutions it would take nearly an hour due to initial setup steps. These steps include making sure you have the latest java software installed for your computer and browser setting up a smartsolutions web account (use a Windows computer if you have one because that gives you access to a greater number of smartsolutions) going through a setup routine with your smartsolutions web account going through a setup routine on the printer and then learning how to actually setup a smartsolution. This involves dragging an icon over from the list of smartsolutions configuring it hitting "save" on the web site and then selecting from the printer smartsolutions/more options/update now. Once you do all this once it's pretty easy to configure more smartsolutions - but there was a lot of overhead to get to the first smartsolution. Every once in a while a smartsolution download/upload doesn't work and you have to redo it - perhaps the network connection is lost every once in while. Also the smartsolutions website goes down a few hours each week - during that time no smartsolutions can be added or changed.
0-3 hours: Troubleshooting. It took me over two hours with tech support to resolve a minor manufacturing defect (and if you read reviews you'll find quite a few similar stories). In the middle of the initial setup process after installing the printhead and the cartridges the printer did not recognize the printhead as being installed. I tried calling tech support with the special dedicated phone line but the phone number did not work for the first couple days after I got the printer. So I used the general printer support number. This involved long wait times and once getting my phone call cut off (and the rep had not taken my phone number so I had to start all over with the next rep). I also found the quality of tech support was not so great with the general Lexmark phone number. After my 2nd call and a series of troubleshooting steps Lexmark decided to replace the printhead and cartridges. A few days later I received and installed the replacements but still not recognized. So I called tech support again and this time it was with the dedicated phone number which was thankfully working. This time the tech support guy I got was good - he may have been consulting with an expert because several times he put me on hold for 1-2 minutes. In the end it turned out that I had to use a pen to press down many parts of two different white pads inside the printer (under where the printhead goes). One pad was not visible and required several minutes of explanation before I could find it. And then it finally worked. Throughout this process I did a number of deep cleans of the printhead and noticed that each such clean depleted about 1/8 of the ink in all 4 cartridges.
There were other minor setup hassles as well such as being asked to register the printer again after already registering (each new driver installation) not being able to download the OCR software from Lexmark's web site (must use disc) and a few temporary connection failures.
1-7 hours Total: Even a minimal setup with no smartsolutions and no technical difficulties would take an hour and adding just a few smartsolutions will likely add another hour. From reading reviews it appears that many people experience technical difficulties setting up e-mail installing the print cartridges or some other issue - so a 3-5 hour total setup time may be typical for the pro805. Considering that a typical all-in-one takes 15-30 minutes to set up this is the big negative compared to the competition and is a legitimate reason to avoid the printer. We are the types of people who change printers once every 5-10 years so if the Pro805 lasts over 5 years without problems then the setup hassle will have been worth it given everything else this printer has to offer.More detail ...
