Lexmark Prospect Pro205 Printer Review

An all-in-one inkjet printer with a scanner, copier, fax, card slots, built-in Wi-Fi, a duplexer, individual ink cartridges, a sheet feeder and great output should cost about £300. So why does Lexmark want just £170 for the Prospect Pro205? It's got more capabilities than you can shake a significant quantity of sticks at, but the elephant in the room is its more affordable, less ambitious sibling.

The 'Pro' in this particular printer's moniker points to its business focus. Besides from the regular printing and scanning functionality, it too includes a built-in fax together with dedicated dialling buttons set at the front-mounted panel, and a sheet feeder on top of the scanner. This machine will certainly enable you to allow it to get on with the task whilst you head off to get cup of joe. Sadly, oftentimes, there is you don't need to dash back.

The Pro205, performance wise, trails by a large margin compared to the cheaper, less feature-rich Lexmark Impact S305, not to mention that latter lacks a fax and feeder.. The Pro205 completed our 10-page text test in 1 minute and 43 seconds on draft quality while it only took 58 seconds for the S305. On normal mode, the machine needed just over 2 minutes to finish the test, and 5 minutes and 44 seconds at highest quality.

On the brighter side, the results of the Pro205 are excellent, thus you might not mind waiting for the prints. We'd be absolutely pleased using the draft results in a business context, and making use of the best quality settings offers results as great as a laser printer's output.

Black texts looked solid at normal and best-quality mode on photocopy paper, and the white texts on black background looked sharp and unfeathered right down to eight points. Although on draft quality, there are some visible misalignment in blocks of solid colour in which the head passed in each direction, for that reason business graphics ought to be printed in this setting for testing and proofing reason only.

There was no any visible signs of bleeding when we printed black characters on coloured background, however, there was a lack of differentation on mid-tone greys. With a 21-step scale operating in between pure black and white, the steps in between 35% and 50% have been hard to distinguish, which runs into one another. Also, 95% and 100% black were definitely both rendered solid black. The colours looked natural though even on ordinary office paprt, having strong primary and secondary tones.

Despite being so well-suited to business use, the Pro205 is an excellent photo printer, which immediately adds to its appeal for home users. Once again, taking 3 minutes and 12 seconds per page, it is not fast enough in comparison to the s305, which requires under 50 % of time to generate identical outcomes. Although, if you don't mind waiting and use ideal photo paper, you'll be compensated with bright, realistic colours, satisfyingly strong blacks, as well as super-smooth transitions among adjoining, similar tones.

You can get two different sizes of 100 ink cartridges, in return program format, the 100XL cartridges will cost you less.

The Pro205's build quality is excellent, and there's no denying that it's a visually attractive device. We our disappointed however with the mechanics of the scanner's sheet feeder which won't enable you to lift the lid to be able to scan fat originals including periodicals, in the way you can on the S305.

By judging on its output only, the Lexmark Prospect Pro205 is a superb printer, and also its particular wide range set of features - specifically the sheet feeder, built-in duplexer and fax - more than justify the price. It's just a shame though, that it is over-matched by the cheaper Impact S305.


Lexmark Prospect Pro205 printer ink cartridges can be found here.