Mark Lyn­der­say

Lex­mark's lo­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tives were ter­ri­bly keen for me to try their new print­er, the Gen­e­sis S815. I'd re­sist­ed gen­tly for weeks. This was a print­er, af­ter all, it puts ink on pa­per, where was the mir­a­cle?

The S815 is a mul­ti­func­tion print­er, merg­ing the util­i­ty of a fax ma­chine, a scan­ner and a print­er in­to a sin­gle de­vice. It's hefty, even by the chunky mea­sure­ments of this class of pe­riph­er­als, but Lex­mark has put some wel­come thought in­to the shape of the de­vice, which will still con­sume just over a foot square on your desk. The S815 takes its cue from the tall, grav­i­ty-fed com­pact inkjet print­ers that Canon used to make, putting a sleek, min­i­mal­ist face to the user with just a pow­er but­ton and an LCD screen rough­ly the size of the one you'd find on a smart­phone.

So far, this is just a nice­ly de­signed mul­ti­func­tion print­er. Let's find out what Lex­mark is so ex­cit­ed about.

First up, the print­er can join your wire­less net­work. Not the most amaz­ing de­vel­op­ment, but many WiFi print­ers make net­work con­nec­tiv­i­ty far more of a tech­ni­cal chal­lenge than it needs to be. On this de­vice, you tap the WiFi "fan" icon on the LCD screen and a user-friend­ly log-in screen ap­pears. If you can sign in­to a wire­less net­work us­ing a com­put­er or a smart­phone, you can set up the print­er. There's a CD in the box, but I al­ways grab the newest print­er soft­ware on­line, and I got the cur­rent dri­ver for my sys­tem on­line at Lex­mark with no is­sues. I like to lo­cate print­ers away from my im­me­di­ate work area and the ready wire­less ca­pa­bil­i­ty makes it pos­si­ble to put the print­er any­where there's a good sig­nal.

The scan­ner func­tion is a bit of a sur­prise. In­stead of a tra­di­tion­al scan­ning sen­sor, Lex­mark has put a ten megapix­el cam­era in the de­vice, which makes for a lot of air in the de­sign. Once you pop the scan­ning lid open (the face of the de­vice) through the glass you'll find the lens of the cam­era that snaps what­ev­er's on the scan­ner bed. There seems to be a low grade scan­ning sen­sor built in­to the de­vice to pro­vide a pre­view but an ac­tu­al scan makes a gra­tu­itous cam­era click sound, and the im­age pops up on the crisp LCD screen al­most in­stant­ly. The im­age shows up across the net­work just a bit more slow­ly, and the im­age qual­i­ty will be fine for busi­ness use and copy­ing. Pho­to con­nois­seurs will want to look else­where for a scan­ner that's sharp­er and less noisy. Print qual­i­ty is good, about av­er­age for Lex­mark's mid­dle of the pack print en­gines, but the com­pa­ny has packed more sur­pris­es in­to its new print­er.

Log in­to the print­er's "smart so­lu­tions" page on the web with the print­er on­line and you can cus­tomise the soft­ware that shows up on the LCD screen. There isn't much there, but there are a few ap­pli­ca­tions that make in­ven­tive use of the print­er's hard­ware and...there's Face­book and Twit­ter. In a smart move, you con­fig­ure the soft­ware on the com­put­er, in­clud­ing log-ins and then the soft­ware is trans­ferred to the print­er where you get ba­sic streams from both ser­vices on the LCD. I'd been look­ing at Mi­mo's lit­tle sev­en-inch LCD screens for ex­act­ly this kind of thing, and hav­ing ac­cess to a life so­cial net­work stream on your print­er might not be the kind of ex­trav­a­gance it seems. In sum­ma­ry, the S815 might just be mul­ti­func­tion so­lu­tion for a small work­group or home of­fice, but po­ten­tial buy­ers should test the qual­i­ty of scans and prints to en­sure that it meets their needs.