Design
There's not been a whole lot of innovation in the multifunction printer (MFP) space in recent years, and that's for one very simple reason. By the time you combine a scanner tray, printhead mechanism and paper mechanism together, you're limited to only a few basic shapes on offer. The S605 looks, for the most part, like any other black multifunction printer, until you look down at the control panel and realise that most of the buttons are missing. There's an indent for the power button next to a glossy black resistive touchscreen panel. Power up the S605 and it springs to life with large and simple buttons for common scanning and copying tasks, as well as a button labelled "Smart Solutions". More on that shortly.
Features
Looking at print speeds, the S605 isn't that much to get excited about. Lexmark rates it with a black print speed of up to 33 pages per minute (ppm) in draft black and 30ppm in colour. The scanner has 48-bit depth, but do note that it's a fax-free model, if faxing is important to you. Media card support extends to SD, MMC, xD and Memory Stick, with a PictBridge slot just below that. The S605 is 802.11n compatible.
One interesting new feature — at least for a Lexmark printer — is the inclusion of discrete ink tanks. There's an argument for cost savings here with three colour tanks and one larger black tank.
The hero feature of this product is the LCD touchscreen, which adapts its on-screen display to be relevant to the task at hand. This makes it a genuinely intuitive printer to use in pretty much any case or scenario, as it'll guide you through each process in turn.
The LCD also enables what Lexmark calls "Smart Solutions". These are web delivered miniature apps with a general printing bent to them, downloaded from Lexmark's dedicated web portal. Lexmark's hype for the S605 mentions "creating" your own Smart Solutions, but that's arguably a little deceptive. At least when we checked, all you could do was register your S605 and download Lexmark's existing Smart Solutions.
Performance
Installation of the S605 was surprisingly easy for a couple of key reasons. Firstly, Lexmark has finally cleaned up its installation procedures. Whereas in the past you'd have enough time in-between starting the installation and actually printing to start a small land war in Asia, the S605's software installation was speedy. Physical installation was mostly problem free, especially as the LCD panel in the S605 doubles up as a display monitor showing you what the next series of actions should be. Our only problem here was fitting the ink tanks, as it took us a little while to work out the correct way to get them to properly click into place.
Getting Smart Solutions onto the S605 does involve registering it with Lexmark, and the cynical part of our brains wonders if having a printer that talks back to its vendor won't result in it chucking a hissy fit if non-Lexmark cartridges are used within it. That having been said, there's a wide variety of Smart Solutions on offer. These range from the rather obvious — advanced copying presets, file printing and so on — to rather more obscure, like getting RSS feeds of MSNBC or Apple Hot News headlines to pop up on the printer. It's also worth noting that some Smart Solutions are Windows only, which is odd when you consider that it's software that's delivered to the printer, not to an operating system per se.
Print speeds on the S605 didn't entirely live up to expectations, with a draft page taking 15 seconds to emerge from the printer, and an average print speed in draft of 13ppm, well under the claimed 33. Photo printing a 10x15cm borderless print took 55 seconds. The S605's photo output was largely unremarkable, with most photos coming out a little drab and flat.
Conclusion
At AU$399, the S605 isn't an entry-level MFP, and it doesn't carry the kind of print or photo speeds we'd expect from a premium unit. On the other hand, the LCD panel works beautifully, and the flexibility of Smart Solutions do give it an edge over a more locked down multifunction device.
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