Print
Discuss
Send to friend
As pressure on desk space becomes ever more acute, the desire to get peripherals that take up less room grows ever stronger.
One space-saving measure that manufacturers hope to sell us is the idea of the integrated scanner and printer. Two devices take up less space than one and having the scanner attached to the printer means you also get a photocopier.
In the past though, scanner, printer and copier machines - more commonly known as 'multi-function devices' - have suffered in order to be flexible.
If they were good scanners, prints often looked like they had been through the wash and good printers were sullied by poor scanning.
Lexmark reckons that the new X75 delivers on all fronts. Without even plugging it in, it's obvious that one thing is spot on. Pull it out of the box and you'll wonder where the rest of it is. It's not tiny but compared with the previous generation of Lexmarks, this is small. It's flatter than you'd expect and doesn't take up much more desk space than a regular inkjet printer. When the paper tray is unfurled, however, it does start to look big.
The X75 can only be connected using USB, which is no problem for the majority of PC or Mac users - although that does mean it will only work on Windows 98 PCs and later. One advantage of USB is a quick and easy set-up, and we were up and running in a matter of minutes. Installing the software is very easy indeed and once the printer is detected, it is ready to go.
We set about testing print speed first of all and it wasn't hugely impressive.
Three pages a minute of text isn't earth-shatteringly fast but it's acceptable. The fact it slowed to one page per minute when we mixed text and simple colour graphics was a little disappointing, although the 10 minutes taken to print an A4 colour photo is no worse than the majority of budget inkjet printers.
Print quality is reasonably good. The text was readable at 2pt size and was sharp at more normal sizes. Only very fine lines showed up any deficiencies.
In photo printing, the Lexmark is no match for a dedicated photo printer, but for occasional snaps the grainy finish is compensated for by the good colours and fine detailing.
As a scanner, the Lexmark is pretty good. It suffers some problems when dealing with 3D objects, but as a page scanner it works very well.
As a photocopier, it's okay but the colour copying has a few niggles. It doesn't need the computer switched on, which is very handy, but colour copies aren't of photo quality with washed-out colours and poor definition.
Also, anything smaller than A4 emerges with a big patch of grey around it. With a normal commercial photocopier this doesn't matter; with an inkjet one it wastes a lot of precious - and not to mention expensive - ink. The quality is fine in black and white but the grey band remains an issue when copying smaller bits and bobs.
Using the copier is a snap thanks to the obvious controls on the front panel. All in all, the X75 is a very competent machine. There are plenty of niggly problems but none are so bad as to deter us from deeming it worthy of consideration.
DETAILS
Price: £129Contact: Lexmark 01628 481500www.lexmark.co.uk
See also:
A capable and low-cost colour scanner, inkjet printer and fax machine. 12 Jun 2002
Space-saving, quality output from this combined fax, printer and scanner. 20 Mar 2001All Inkjet Printers
del.icio.us
Digg this
reddit!
