Lexmark Interact S605 Wireless 3-in-1 with Web-enabled Touchscreen

5 comments

1. 

   Silea on December 20, 2009 at 9:19 am

   Setting this printer up for the first time is a bit interesting. The ink cartridges and print heads are hidden inside the printer. It’s a miniature easter egg hunt to find the pieces you need. Then, of course, the ink cartridges don’t quite click into their slots as definitively as you might hope, so that takes a bit of trial and error. Setting the printer to work when connected to the computer takes a while of watching the software work, but is pretty brainless. Getting it to work wireless is a process full of mystery and confusion. I followed all the steps, and it didn’t work because my computer couldn’t detect the printer, even after the printer itself had found the wireless router. Annoyed, i went to lunch, and when i came back, my computer could detect the printer. So, eventually it got it to work, and i don’t exactly know how (i have a degree in Computer Science, by the way).

   Once everything’s talking to everything, it’s great. My only complaint is that i keep opening the whole printer instead of just the lid to the flat-bed scanner. It doesn’t break anything, but it is annoying.

   The touch-screen is responsive, and the icons are big enough that adult fingers can hit them reliably. The almost-one-touch copying/scanning is handy.

   Ok, apparently i lied, i have another complaint: scanning to your computer is handled very strangely. Instead of just scanning to jpg or pdf, as it does when you’re scanning to a USB drive or memory card, it scans to an application. Not only is that strange, but it’s opaque. There’s no indication on the scanner itself of why, for example, scanning into Preview (on a mac) will produce a TIFF while scanning to photoshop will produce a jpg. It’s so, so easy to scan to a USB drive, i wish i could just tell the printer to dump a PDF on my desktop. When you do scan to your computer, you can choose to ’scan to file’, which opens up a window on your desktop (on a mac, at least) that lets you choose the format, but that’s still several steps more than it should be.

   There are little perks, too, like the microfibre cloth to clean the scanning glass, and a USB printer cable (no printer i’ve participated in unpacking in the past five years has had a cable packaged with it, until this one which, ironically, is wireless-capable).

2. 

   Susan on December 20, 2009 at 12:15 pm

   These are just a few of the items that are needed to have a complete kitchen. The printer was a perfect match to the computer, which is an MSI touchscreen and is small enough to fit almost anywhere. You just never know when you might need to print out that recipe, store coupon, or perhaps a knitting pattern.

   This was an interesting printer to set up, different from the ones I have done before. I say this because the quick start manual says to make sure the printer is not connected to anything and install the software. In all the other printers I have set up, the manuals walk you completely through the setup. This printer walks you through the complete procedure using the CD and the LCD screen on the printer. The package print head is located inside the printer and the CD will make you aware of that. But, I investigated inside first before I did anything else, and removed the printer head. The ink cartridges are in the area where the paper is ejected. After completing the steps of installing the print head, and then the ink cartridges, the printer will want to align the print head, and upon doing so a page is printed out. Make sure the paper tray is fully extended. Otherwise, the paper will either jam or wrinkle, inside the area. The paper tray has a small lip at the end to prevent the paper from sliding off. Next comes the procedure of finding your network. Again, this is where the Lexmark is different from any other printer. I have set up a few wireless printers, and most printers are set up using their LCD display, usually somewhere in settings or network or however the printer manufacturer describes it. The Lexmark does it through the computer that you’re setting it up for. Going through the steps it will ask you if you have a certain type of router that has a button on it that I have never seen. When you answer no, the next window that comes up asks you to connect the provided USB cable from the computer you are working on to the printer. By pressing continue it will search for your network, which you can identify and enter an encryption key if needed. After that, Lexmark lets you know it has made the connection and to disconnect the USB cable. Now you are able to print wirelessly. So I gave it a try just to see if there was a lot of lag time between sending the data from the computer to the final print out. My setup goes from the kitchen to a room where the router is and back to the printer in the kitchen and to my surprise the lag time was very short.

   The next thing I usually do is to try out the software that was installed on the computer. Under Lexmark there’s a program called Printer Home. This is what you want to click on in order to have the versatility of the printer. There are four scan categories to choose from – photo, documents, e-mail and PDF. The scan to photo has two options; one, the single photo, and the other is split into individual photo. The second one was interesting. Lexmark will ask you if you want a test page printed out at the end of the set up. It prints out a page with a color bar on the top, the Lexmark logo on the right hand side, some hot air balloons in the middle and another color bar at the bottom of the page. When you select the second option of splitting the photo into individual photos it literally saved four versions of the photo. The color bar was one, the logo was the second, the hot air balloons was the third, and the color bar at the bottom was the fourth. This was an interesting first for me. I can definitely see some interesting possibilities. Of course the rest of the categories are pretty straightforward. Scanning to a document or to an e-mail or making it a PDF. The Printer Home software gives you the most options of how you want to scan and save different things in different formats. Plus it has other options at the bottom of its page, such as print head alignment, wireless setup, and so forth. Next it was time to use the LCD control panel on the printer. The LCD panel swings out from the body of the printer and stays in its 45° position by friction. So I wondered if the panel would stay in his position as you push down the different icons on the screen. The touchscreen is very sensitive, so pushing on the screen is a very light touch, and that helps the panel stay in position.

   Copying offers a lot of options. Things like number of copies, color or black-and-white. You can also select more options, which expands the versatility of copying, such as two into one, eight to one and 16 to 1. Along with other options such as paper type, paper size, quality, and the band plays on. This is where an automatic document feeder is missed. If you had a two-sided sheet that you wanted to print out, you have to scan one side and then the other manually. This printer does have the capability of duplexing, which does add to the features.

   Next feature tried from the LCD control panel on the printer was scanning. The options here are a little limited, compared to using the software. When you choose scan you have the option of scanning to the computer, scanning to memory device or scanning to e-mail. When I say a little limited, I mean that everything I scanned to a file was always in JPEG form, whereas the software gives you the option of other formats. The computer would have to be on anyway in order to scan to the computer or to e-mail, but if you are just scanning to a memory device, I guess this would be very convenient.

   The last icon on the LCD control panel is Smart Solutions. It comes with a few smart solutions on it to begin with, I.D. card copy and photo reprint. But in order to get the full features of smart solutions you need to go and create an account at the Lexmark website. This is easy to do. You can either click on the link that the software provided on your computer under Lexmark or on the LCD panel under the smart solutions icon then click on more options. There’s a link there that will send your browser to the smart solution page. The only other one I added to my smart solution was the MSNBC link, but there are quite a few to choose from. There are even smart solutions that you can customize for copying and scanning.

   I also had to see what would happen by plugging in a USB thumb drive into the printer. It recognized the thumb drive and gave me three options on the LCD screen. One is photo, the other is document, and the last is send to e-mail. I chose photo to see what the LCD screen would display, and lo and behold, two pictures I had put on the thumb drive showed up. So I decided to print out one of them. You can just accept it and print it or you can go into more options and adjust all the settings. Then I tried looking at a document. It listed of all the supported documents, which are many, on the thumb drive. Next I removed the thumb drive and inserted a USB cable from my camera to the printer. The Pictbridge icon came up. When I tapped the icon, it told me to print from the camera, so I scrolled through the LCD on the camera, picked a picture, clicked on more options, selected my settings and printed the picture. With the 4.2 LCD screen, looking at pictures makes it easy to decide what you want to print out. The bottom of the LCD panel has four icons, one for eco-mode (duplexing, printing in draft, and reducing the backlight on the LCD panel), one for duplexing, one for settings, and the one that I appreciate the most is the amount of ink that is left in the cartridges.

   My first all-in-one was the original Lexmark for home users. This continued to work flawlessly until the day I got rid of it. The biggest reason I upgraded to another type of printer was because of the cost of the ink for the Lexmark and the problems of the ink drying out when not in use. I hope this situation has improved. I like the uniqueness of this printer because of the LCD screen and the option that it gives you to interact with the outside world rather than just print or scan. Is this a printer I would use for a small business – No. Is this a printer I would use for the home office? I think that would depend on how much printing I was planning on doing every day. With each cartridge having a yield of 100 you could be using ink at a rapid rate. Is this a printer I would have for personal use, most definitely. This is a fun printer to use, and it has enough versatility to suit my personal needs at a reasonable price.

3. 

   Sean P. Logue on December 20, 2009 at 12:41 pm

   This is a very attractive printer. It has a large touch screen on the front that looks a lot like an iPhone and a couple of large, hidden buttons that light up when available. The overall look is gloss black, and just looks great sitting on a desk or shelf.

   The software walked me through the entire installation, step by step, with graphics showing exactly what to do. When it came time to do things on the printer itself, the large color touch screen walked me through the rest of the installation. The wireless printing worked flawlessly, and means that the printer doesn’t have to be near a computer.

   I printed out several large, color graphics and they all look vibrant, crisp, and clear. No wrinkling of the paper (which can happen if too much ink is sprayed out.) The individually replaceable cartridges is nice to see because the entire thing doesn’t have to be replaced whenever an individual color runs out.

   The large, flat bed scanner on top also works well, and can email you with the results in PDF or jpg format. That’s pretty cool!

   The only part I found less useful is the ability to display headlines and other things from the web on the front. It worked, but I can’t see checking my printer for the weather forecast when it is available so many other places already. Perhaps some will find it useful depending on where the printer is placed.

4. 

   vettekid95 on December 20, 2009 at 1:57 pm

   I purchased this printer the other day to replace my Lexmark X74. The X74 printer still works perfectly (in WinXP), but will not work with the new Windows 7 OS. There is no new driver available for it. Lexmark has determined that the printer is too old and they will not develop a new printer driver for it. So, I was basically forced to upgrade my printer.

   I really liked my old Lexmark so I decided to purchase another one. I did some research and settled on the S605. I liked the look of it and the wireless feature so I purchased it and took it home to set up on my wireless network.

   I have to tell you that the installation went flawlessly. As mentioned in some of the reviews I read, that reading and following the directions made it go smoothly. In about 30 mins. I had all THREE of our computers setup and printing with this printer.

   I gave this printer a 3 star rating due to it’s printer cartridges. I am a little disappointed that the cartridges can’t be refilled and are a little pricey. The cartridges (#100) have a chip installed in them that prevents the cartridges from being refilled. I’ve had my X74’s cartridges refilled in the past and they worked perfectly – and cost a lot less than new cartridges. I only hope that I can at least get close to the number of pages printed, that Lexmark says I should get. Somehow, I don’t believe that’s going to happen. Probably will turn out like the estimated mpg your supposed to get on your new car – time will tell.

5. 

   Kent J. Smythe on December 20, 2009 at 4:25 pm

   I’ve heard some positive things about Lexmark & their new models so I decided to try them out.

   Putting it all together was a breeze and it’s mighty nice in appearance.

   I really like the LCD touchscreen,it’s where you go to to tell this machine what you want done,the only actual button on the unit is the on/off button,which is a new thing for me. The various functions only illuminate when their functions are valid at that time,so it makes it a bit less confusing.

   I’ve done some printing now and the sheets look pretty good,I’m been using Canon for years and the Lexmark prints at about the same speed but the duplex printing is easier and faster than the Canon.

   This printer’s inks are set up with individual tanks for the three colors & the black,which is what I’m used to and prefer.

   This model also has a scanner that has a 8.5 x 11.7 inches copy area and it’s fine for my everyday business copying,letters,bills,receipts etc,but for more adventurous scanning that requires a higher resolution I’m going to stick elsewhere.

   Setting up the wireless is very easy and direct,it’s something I will be using in the spring and I can’t comment on the actual use currently but seems surprisingly simple.It is web-enabled but I don’t see the advantage there so I’m going pass on that at this time.

   Overall as a first time Lexmark owner & user I like what I see here. It’s rather intuitive and doesn’t make me anymore confused than I already am as a first time user,I have big hopes for the future as I settle in and use this everyday.