At first glance, the Lexmark Z605 Color Jetprinter and Z705 Photo Jetprinter look like identical twins. Both share the same attractive three-tone sculpted case design, and both have an unusual power supply: A power brick slips into a cavity in the printer case. But a closer look at the two models reveals that the Z705 must have spent more time in the gym: It's 2 inches wider and weighs about a pound more. Both models print well, but they have their shortcomings.

The Z605 is priced at just $50, tying the Canon i250 for least expensive. Compared with its sibling, the Lexmark Z705, it's smaller, slower, and has only a power switch on the front panel. The black draft mode is rated at 14 ppm; color draft is 8 ppm. Even at this price, these are fairly slow ratings, but the Z605 lives up to them. It was the slowest printer we tested, save the Epson Stylus Photo 900.

Print quality was generally good, with good alignment and only faint banding in some gradient fills. Four-point text was legible except in bold fonts. Photos tended to be dark, but with good detail in both dark shadow and highlight regions. The Z605's driver is similar to that of the Z705 but does not include the handy Photo Center utilities.

In addition, the pricing of the cartridges is such that the Z605 had the highest cost of ownership of any printer in this group. After one year of moderate usage, the $50 purchase price ends up costing $387.25. Yikes! As a result, the Z605 is going to be a more expensive choice if you print a reasonable number of pages. Even if you don't plan on printing much, there are other printers under $100 that deliver better value.

As its full name states, the Lexmark Z705 Photo Jetprinter is a personal ink jet capable of photo printing. It can accept an optional tricolor photo cartridge in place of the standard black one, and it can print borderless photos. On our tests, photos came out a little dark, but there was good detail in both dark shadow and highlight areas. Four-point text was legible (except in bold fonts); alignment was generally good; and faint banding was visible only in some gradient fills.

Installation and setup is fairly easy. The printer automatically aligns its cartridges as it prints a single test page. The print driver is versatile and uses a modern "skin"-style interface that includes features such as n-up, poster, watermark, and booklet printing. Surprisingly, there are no photo adjustment options in the driver, but the printer can automatically sense the type of paper in the input bin. The Z705 comes with Lexmark's Photo Center software, which makes it easy to organize and format digital photos for printing. It also includes a utility that lets you make basic edits to digital images.

The Z705 is rated at only 17 ppm in black draft mode and 10 ppm in color draft, and these slow speeds held up on our tests. The Z705 took more than three times as long to complete our test suite as the blazing HP Business Inkjet 1100d. In particular, Adobe Acrobat files proved to be this printer's downfall. At $80, the Z705 is priced a bit lower than comparable printers, but its speed and quality are also noticeably lower.