By Dr. Matthew H. Fields, composer, Ann Arbor, Michigan

On the surface of it, the Z11 seemed like a smart investment: a $99 printer that could do 1200 DPI, albeit quite slowly. By the time I print a document, it is completely finished, and I use 1200 DPI because music notation contains many glyphs (slurs, crescendos) that are just slightly tilted from horizontal, so at lower resolutions, stairsteps are inevitable. So I purchased it in 1999 from Office Max here in Ann Arbor.

In a market in which the unprintable margins of paper are usually less than 1/4 inch (often as little as 1/5 inch and sometimes as little as 1/100 inch), the Z11 refuses to print on the last 1/2 inch of the page. This minor annoyance made it wasteful of Avery forms like labels and business cards.

The control program, v.1.0.4, implements standard printing commands incorrectly, so certain very standard applications, notably Adobe Acrobat, would always print pages 1/4 inch low on the page, causing misalignments with e.g. Avery forms, and raising the unprintable area at the bottom of the page to an effective 3/4 inch. Technical Support at Lexmark pointed the finger at Adobe, though Lexmark printers are the only printers suffering from this problem, and nobody at Lexmark expressed any interest in fixing the problem.

The $18 toner cartridges consistently initially proved capable of printing no more than 50 pages.

After a few months of light use, printing developed light or unprinted areas, making the printer useless. Technical Support's only answer was that I should install a new toner cartridge. With a lot of repeated printing of test pages and use of the Clean Nozzles and Align Nozzles program, I was able to get an average of 10 pages out of each toner cartridge for some months. Finally, even with a new toner cartridge, after I had followed all of the instructions in the booklet, the printer was unable to print a legible page at all.

During the lifetime of the printer, it printed less than 1000 pages, at a price of about $400 in toner above and beyond the price of the printer. I assessed the track record of the printer and of Lexmark and decided that sending the printer in for repairs would be an unwise business decision. So I purchased a competitor's printer, and I got to work focussing on my business rather than on the printer.