I've been somewhat interested in color printers for quite some time, but until recently I didn't have any real interest in buying one due to the extra cost of a good color printer. (In fact, a few years ago when I had to replace a broken inkjet printer I had the choice of color or black for the same price; I took the black printer partly because the dealer didn't have any black cartridges in stock for the color printer.)  But then my uncle bought, almost sight unseen, Lexmark's 5700 and asked me to pick it up while he was out of town. I hooked it up to my PC and printed out a few images, and to make a long story short I bought my own less than a week later and haven't regretted it for a moment.
   First of all, the 5700 is by no means the cheapest color inkjet around.  (One of the least expensive, and a good buy in its own right, is Lexmark's 1100.) It's hardly the most expensive, either.  The Lexmark 5700's big attraction is its high resolution – 1200 dots per inch both horizontally and vertically. It was surprising enough to be able to get that sort of resolution from a medium-priced laser printer a few years ago; getting such quality from a $250 printer is simply astounding, and to sweeten the pot this resolution holds true for both black and full-color printing. (Several competing printers boast a resolution of 1440 dpi along one axis and 720 along the other, so the 5700 prints 38% more dots than those printers.)
The Lexmark 5700, like most medium-priced color printers (but unlike the low-priced class), keeps both the color and black print cartridges in the machine so you don't have to swap them when you go from black to color printing. This also allows the printer to automatically use both cartridges when printing each page – to combine black text and color photos, for example – though (possibly for reasons of speed) it doesn't use black ink when printing color images.  Printing speed in the 600 dpi draft mode is up to 8 pages per minute for black only, 4 for color.
   Color print quality is surprisingly good – surprising to someone unfamiliar with Lexmark printers, that is. The secret is a special print driver called ColorFine, designed by Software 2000 in England, that is "tuned" to the exact colors of the inks being used to deliver the most accurate color through accurate dithering of dots. Lexmark has been using the basic ColorFine driver since they introduced the ExecJet Iic 4076 four years ago and the ColorFine 3 driver supplied with the 5700 is a stellar performer in color printing.
   With the popularity of digital cameras and video capture devices these days, a lot of people (including me) like to digitally "process" photos and print them at home.  (I used to do my own developing and printing – in black-and-white that is – so this sort of capability is a dream come true for me.) Several makers have answered the call with fairly expensive photographic printers ($400 and up) that use special techniques to lay down varying amounts of ink for each dot and usually use six colors of ink (rather than the usual three or four) to expand the color "gamut" and reproduce a greater variety of colors than can be printed using four inks. While the Lexmark 5700 isn't specifically designed as a photo printer it can do a very good job of it using a special photo cartridge (which sells for $40); this replaces the black ink cartridge and provides two more ink colors (for a total of six, counting black) to not only print in high-fidelity color but also to reduce the "graininess" caused by dot dithering; snapshot-sized color prints I made on special inkjet photo paper weren't any more grainy than I'd expect from conventional prints from ISO 400 film, and 8x10" "enlargements" were more than acceptable.  The printer comes with a little storage case to hold either the black or photo cartridge while the other is in use.
   The 5700's paper handling is very good; there's no need to move a lever to insert paper or to switch to the manual feed.  In fact the manual feed automatically overrides the main paper tray, so if you're only printing one sheet you don't have to select the manual feed in your application – just insert a sheet and go.  Since the paper is bent inward (not outward) labels will work fine, though it's best to use labels identified as made for inkjet printers; for normal printing any decent copier-type paper will work well, though I use any of several brands of plain papers made especially for inkjet printing.
   In case you were wondering if there was a catch, there is – but it's a minor one for most people.  The Lexmark 5700 can print (in black or color at 300 dpi) from DOS applications, but only using the Windows printer driver. If the application can run "in a box" in Windows you're all set, but if the DOS application doesn't like printing in Windows you'll need to print to a file, restart Windows and copy the file to the printer.
   Lexmark's support is among the best in the industry, and if the printer fails within the one-year warranty they'll get a replacement to you on the next business day. They sell ink cartridges online at competitive prices, and even have a free service that gives you updates by e-mail when they release a new driver for your printer.  The 5700 Color Jetprinter is a good value at $249 list, and through January 31 Lexmark is offering a $50 mail-in rebate making this an even better deal.

n Ed Ellers

   Link to the Lexmark Web site