Lexmark Genesis S815

The Lexmark Genesis S815 is a delightfully pretty piece of tech. It stands proudly upright, while its competitors squat their bulk over the better part of your desk. The front is finished in piano black – the sort to attract fingerprints like nobody’s business – and its LCD touchscreen is set into that front panel so seamlessly that the interface could be painted right onto the surface.

We loved it at first sight.

As innovative as the design is, however, it’s what’s inside that matters. Let’s set this printer’s printing technology aside for a minute, and take a look at its scanner.

Your typical flatbed scanner works by mechanically moving a narrow image sensor along the bottom of the bed, scanning one line of your image at a time. Sheet-fed scanners work much the same, only the image moves while the sensor stays in place. As anyone who has ever scanned a page will know, this can take a while.

The Genesis takes a completely different approach. Beneath the scanner’s bed (which is actually vertical, due to the printer’s upright design), you’ll find a mirror. That mirror reflects your document, photograph or other scan-able object toward a camera and flash unit. Close the lid, and the camera fires: taking a snapshot of the whole scanner bed at once. As far as it appears to the user, the process is instantaneous.

Scan quality is high, while copy quality is average in terms of both detail and colour accuracy: copies are limited by the S815’s ability to reproduce on paper what it scans.

Need to scan fifty photographs? Or, for that matter, five hundred? This is your scanner. Forget that it’s even a printer. The Genesis is going to save you so much time, some people are going to find it’s worth it for the rapid scanner alone.

For everyone else… how does it perform as a printer? Well, sadly the answer is “decidedly average”.

We started our testing with brand-new ink cartridges, out of the printer box. Less than twenty full-colour A4 photographs, and we were out of cyan, yellow and magenta. Black had around two-thirds remaining. So, small sample cartridges?

Those initial prints were substandard – blurry, with inconsistent, below-average detail like a low-quality JPEG image. Roller-marks clearly punctuated the pages like a series of little pin-pricks. We attribute the bad print quality to several factors: we printed straight from a memory card, rather than a PC. This appears to have limited the quality somewhat. We also used too heavy a photo paper, leading to the pronounced roller-marks. Finally, the initial head-cleaning and calibration may have eaten up more ink than we thought, leaving the cartridges substantially drained before we even started with the photos.

Fortunately, a fresh set of ink cartridges and thinner photo-gloss paper stock saw the Genesis producing far nicer prints than before. Colour reproduction was reasonable and detail was high, though there was some decided aliasing (pixelated jaggedness) on starkly contrasted edges. Roller marks also remained present on all images, though to a lesser degree with the thinner paper.

Plain text appeared acceptably sharp and black overall, but some ink-bleed around the edges of characters was occasionally visible, giving them a “fuzzy” look.

The Genesis is an attractive device, and a brilliant rapid-fire scanner. However, it’s also nearly twice the price of most of its competitors. At such a premium, it can’t just be a brilliant scanner: it has to be a brilliant printer, too. That, it sadly is not.

If scanning and copying are what you do, consider the Genesis. If you’re after a printer first and a scanner second, this is not the model for you.