Lexmark Z845

The Lexmark Z845 is a single function printer, which means there isn't much to speak of when it comes to features. The most notable features, in fact, are the bundled software utilities. Lexmark's Fast Pics utility helps you print photos, making the process dead simple and painless. The utility goes first to your My Pictures folder and lets you check which photos you want printed, choose the paper size, and pick how many copies.

You can even perform some minor touch ups on your images, including cropping and red eye reduction. The only drawback is that if you're printing a batch of photos, you have to pick the same number of copies for each. The ability to change the number of prints of each photo seems like a basic feature, and we don't understand why it's missing here.

The Lexmark Solution Center is a cohesive utility that guides you from the basics of setting up the printer to printing tips to projects.

It also shows you how to swap out empty ink cartridges and troubleshoot problems, and it provides contact information should you need to get in touch with customer support. The Lexmark Z845 uses a four color, two tank ink system.

It ships with the standard yield black ($18, approximately 175 pages) and tricolor ($19, approximately 150 pages) cartridges.

But when it comes to replacing the ink, the high yield versions are more economical. The 500 page black cartridge costs $25 and the 475 page high yield color cartridge costs $30. With the high yield cartridges, your per page costs work out to about 5 cents for a black page and 6.3 cents for a page of color. These costs are par for the course for inexpensive printers (low initial cost, higher cost of maintenance). For example, the per page cost for the Canon Pixma iP1700 works out to about 6 cents for a black document and 8 cents for a color document.

You can save an additional $4 per cartridge off the price of the standard cartridges by agreeing to Lexmark's Return Cartridge program. You'll get the up front discount by pledging to return the spent cartridges to Lexmark for recycling or remanufacturing. You can save yet again by signing up to get one free cartridge for every five used ones you return in a 12 month period. For better photo printing, you can replace the black tank with a tricolor photo ink tank ($25) for six color printing.