The Platinum Pro905 sits at the top of Lexmark's range of Professional all-in-one printers. It's aimed at the SOHO market, with one eye on budget colour laser multifunctions. The advantages of inkjet over laser are in colour quality, particularly if you print photos, but this is countered by the cheapness of laser print. Lexmark has thought of this.

If you buy the Platinum Pro905 or its cheaper cousin, the Prestige Pro805, you have access to an exclusive club that lets you fit the 105XL black ink cartridge. This is identical to the 100XL cartridge, but costs a quarter of the price, meaning you can print a black page for around 0.7p, well below the black page cost of most laser multifunctions.

The Platinum Pro sports a few other interesting features, too, like a second paper tray, so you can keep letterheads and follow-on sheets or plain and photo paper loaded at the same time. It has full fax functionality, straight from the control panel, and it has Lexmark's delightful touchscreen controls, where everything is presented as easy to use, large, colour icons and buttons.

You can access the company's SmartSolutions site, too, which offers a number of applets to enhance the facilities of the machine, any of which can be downloaded directly to the printer. Even without them, the machine can print duplex pages as standard, and doesn't wait as long between sides as some of its competitors.

The scanner has a 50-sheet Automatic Document Feeder (ADF) and can handle duplex copying, but only by feeding the original through the scanner twice. Documents can be copied from single to double-sided.

Prints come through pretty quickly, with a 20-page text print producing 6.4ppm, though a five-page black text and colour graphics document barely scraped 3ppm. Duplex print slows the machine, but the drying time of the Vizix inks means it still managed nearly 4ppm. Finally, 15 x 10cm photo prints took around 50 seconds from a PC, memory card, PictBridge and USB drive, quite a bit longer than from recent Canon and Epson machines.

Print quality from the four individual inks is better than from previous Lexmark inkjets and produces good results on plain and photo paper. It's worth mentioning, though, that you can get this from any model in the new Home Office or Pro ranges, as they all use the same engine.

The super-inexpensive black print isn't mirrored in colour print, which we calculate to cost around 6.5p per ISO page. This is still very reasonable, compared with many competitors, but not as far below the norm as the black print cost.

Verdict
This is a versatile, well-equipped all-in-one, which is great to use and flexible enough to handle most small-business tasks. And so it should, at over £350. This is probably the most expensive machine of its type currently available and you'll need to have use for most of its facilities in order to justify the high outlay, though the low monochrome print costs should help high volume users.

Company: Lexmark

Contact: 08704 440044

Tags: lexmark printer automatic document feeder pictbridge home office laser printer seiko epson ink cartridge