The Platinum Pro 905 multifunction printer could be considered the most advanced inkjet all-in-one Lexmark is currently offering. Since it has just about anything you may ever want from a home office or small office printer, the Platinum Pro 905 is very easy to like and choose from a whole bunch of competitors.




As design it doesn’t really shock you. It is average sized for an small office multifunction printer and measures 12 x 18 x 15.5 inches. The functions it offers are print, copy, scan and faxing. On the front of the printer you’ll only discover the control panel with a single button that works for powering the Platinum Pro 905 on. The rest of the input is done with the help of the color touchscreen. Also on the front you get to see a PictBridge USB port that allows direct printing from compatible digital cameras.

The paper tray is situated at the bottom and has a capacity of 150 sheets. On top of that the printer also has a secondary 150 sheet tray that boosts the total paper capacity to 300 sheets. While the top one can work with photo paper as well, the bottom drawer can only contain legal and letter sized media. One very interesting thing about the Platinum Pro 905 inkjet color printer is its use of Lexmark innovative SmartSolutions Web site which was created to offer a lot of content and extra functionality. To explain this better, users can access web-based applications straight from the printer’s large 4.3 inch display.

A button on the LCD can be programmed to launch a series of actions. A few presets come with the printer but users can easily program their own (which is the main idea of SmartSolutions). The presets that you get allow you to view any RSS feed, view or print an agenda from Google calendar. One important thing you need to remember is that for web access to work the printer needs to be hooked up to an Ethernet or wireless network.

Under the bonnet the user can find a four-ink printing system consisting of cyan, magenta, yellow and black cartridges. While the inks are made more for office use than photographic printing and don’t offer very high capacity, the low price of consumables makes this printer be affordable in the long run. So for the most part, the rule ‘buy it cheap but spend more later’ does in fact apply for most printers, especially when they come from Lexmark. In this case, you spend a bit more money initially but get to save throughout use.

Printing speed is satisfactory and the Platinum Pro 905 will produce about 6 pages per minute for black text. Printing, both color and black looks adequate and there’s little to complain about. However photo printing is not great and skin tones are a bit far from what they should be. As a conclusion, the Lexmark Platinum Pro 905 inkjet color printer is a reliable small office printer with satisfactory paper capacity and most of all affordable printing costs.

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