Lexmark S605 Interact All-in-One Printer

The Lexmark S605 Interact is a decent three-in-one printer that offers some great benefits, in particular a large and intelligently designed touchscreen, and a host of customizable applications that make it simple to tailor the printer, scanner, and copier functions to your exact needs. Those options, rather than the speed or quality of the printer (which are completely acceptable), are what make this new printer an exciting and compelling best buy.

Lexmark has done a great job of using user experiences to build their new line of printers. They've exploited the potential of a touchscreen; rather than simply duplicate the overcrowded function panel of most printers, they've made using a function more intuitive. If you're scanning, you only see the functions related to scanning. Even the packaging is new; boxes show clearly what differentiates the Interact from, say, the cheaper Interpret (the latter offers a fax but no touchscreen).

Wireless printing was easy to configure thanks to the large touchscreen. So were most of the SmartSolutions, the customizable applications such as Scan to File that can be downloaded to your printer. Print speeds are decent across a wireless network, with a four-page, color-dense PDF taking about 40 seconds, and a four-page Word document averaging 15 seconds per page. Heavily colored graphics left cheap copy paper looking good but not fantastic; there was ink bleed into the page. Use better paper for better results. I liked that the printer's default configuration is last-page first. Photo prints looked very good indeed, with sharp, clear colors and images.

I did have some trouble figuring out how to close the touchscreen, and some of the SmartSolutions require decent knowledge of networking (if you want to configure Scan to Email, you'd better know where to find SMTP information). However, the SmartSolutions applications are the best reason to go with this printer. If you regularly e-mail PDFs to the same person, or scan to several folders and wish you had a one-touch way to do that easily, you're going to appreciate SmartSolutions. Even better is that the list of applications is sure to grow over time; and if your printer ever dies, you won't lose those customized apps, since they'll live on at the Lexmark site.