If you check out everything that it offers, the Lexmark X9350 seems like the ideal multifunction printer for your home or small office. Its price is good too and it retails for somewhere around $300. You'll get pretty much everything you need in the X9350 including printing, faxing, scanning, copying and yes, even decent quality pictures without being forced to keep the printer connected to the PC.



The PC-less photo printing happens due to the great PictBridge technology that allows producing photos straight from your compatible digital camera. Moreover, the printer also has a built in card reader that also allows direct printing.

Because it includes an automatic document feeder as well as a duplexer, you can just set off to have a cookie while it's doing its job, and know for sure you're saving paper and money because it prints on both sides of a sheet. Since it's network ready, all the users in your office will have no problem queing jobs and relying on the same printer. For an all-in-one inkjet the size of the Lexmark X9350 is more than reasonable.

It weights less than 23 pounds so you won't need the whole office to assist if you plan to move it to another spot. The design somehow reminds you of Apple's philosophy. The device is simple, roundish and white with brushed silver areas. Paper handling was kept rather simple. The input tray has a capacity of 150 sheets and its cover works as the output tray as well. For a higher capacity of paper Lexmark provides an optional secondary input tray.

A 2.4 inch fold-able color LCD and a simple menu make navigation easy and convenient. The LCD can also be adjusted so that the user picks the best angle for viewing. Navigating is done with the help of four direction keys and an OK button. There's also an alphanumeric keypad that serves a clear purpose, it ensures that the user can conveniently dial fax numbers or change the number of prints/copies required.

The color all in one printer features two ink cartridges, a black and a tri-color (cyan, magenta and yellow). If you want higher quality and fidelity when printing photographs, the black tank can easily be swapped with another tri-color one. The cost of the ink tanks is rather affordable and you'll be able to purchase one for around $25. This seems a bit odd because in the case of certain devices from Lexmark you usually pay a more than convenient price initially then end up spending a whole lot on replacing the ink.

So if this printer is so great, why is it much cheaper than most of the competing devices? There are two major points that make this device satisfying yet not great. One of them is the printing speed. Scanning speed is satisfying, at around 6 ppm for color and 8 ppm for mono, but the speed of printing is almost disappointing at around 2 pages per minute in color. The quality of the prints isn't brilliant either. Even when replacing a black cartridge with a second tri-color one for six-color printing you won't get great results.

As a conclusion, according to its specifications the Lexmark X9350 should be top of the line. Unfortunately, aside from all the bling like an ADF, duplexing and great faxing features, this color all-in-one printer doesn't do so good in exactly what is important, speed and quality.

When Lexmark introduced its first small-format dedicated photo printer, the P315, last year, my reaction was unenthusiastic. But its replacement, the P350 ($129.99 direct) makes it clear that the P315 was the hardware equivalent of a 1.0 software release. This year's model is fully ready for prime time.

The P350 is faster than the P315, has the ability to print from a computer, and prints photos that are essentially waterproof. The P315's photos were so lacking in water resistance that even after ample drying time, they would still smudge when touched with moist hands. But I held a freshly printed photo from the P350 under running water and rubbed it, with no visible effect.

Output quality is certainly good enough for snapshots to hand out to family and friends. Every photo I printed displayed true photo quality, with subjects ranging from landscapes to snowscapes to portraits. That said, a few flaws prevent it from being ideal. In our test photos that include people, for example, skin tones looked a touch yellow. In most cases, the color shift simply made people look tanned, but in one case, the face looked jaundiced.

A more global issue, though, is that most of the P350's photos show a slight case of differential gloss, with some areas reflecting light better than others. You can see this effect only from some angles, but at those angles it gives the photos an odd look. You also have to be careful about how you handle photos you care about, because they're relatively easy to scratch. After I finished evaluating photo quality, I noticed several subtle scratches that were caused just by shuffling through the stack and sliding the back of one photo over the front of another.

Print speed is a little on the slow side, but well within the typical range for small-format photo printers. The P350 was slightly faster than the A516 when printing from a computer, at 1 minute 30 seconds per photo (the A516 took 1:47), and just a bit slower when printing from a Canon PowerShot S60 camera or CompactFlash card, ranging from 2:04 to 2:38 compared with 1:43 to 2:06 for the A516.

Lexmark claims photos will cost 29 cents each, based on a $29 (street) print pack with enough ink and paper for 100 photos. Ink cartridges and paper are also available separately, but if you buy them that way, you'll wind up with a higher cost per photo.

The P350's one serious disadvantage over the A516 is its higher price, which leaves the A516 safely in place as the Editors' Choice for low-cost dedicated photo printers. But if you do spend the extra cash on the P350, you'll get a larger LCD screen for better previewing, editing features that the A516 lacks, and a reasonably good value for the price.

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Inkjet all-in-one machines are definitely beginning to take over from inkjet printers as the main consumer printing device. For very little more money, you have all the extra functionality of scanning and copying. Lexmark has a range of all-in-ones to suit all prices and the Lexmark X5470 sits above its entry-level devices and offers faxing as well as photo printing.

Lexmark's text print is of reasonable quality, if a little heavy. There's little spatter evident, but it still looks slightly overprinted. Colour graphics are not too hot, either, with obvious banding in areas of solid colour. This is particularly true of colour photocopies, where the main colours are also reproduced considerably paler than when printed direct.

Photo prints, as we've noted before on Lexmark machines, are considerably better than plain paper prints, relevant to their main rivals. Colours are a little over vivid, but nothing objectionable, and there's some micro-banding noticeable, though prints are still OK for everyday use.

Lexmark is honest enough to quote print speeds for print in normal mode, as well as draft mode, but 15ppm for black print and 5ppm for colour print doesn't match up to what we saw. Our five page text print completed in 47 seconds, so just over 5ppm, while our colour document took 2:24, only just over 2ppm – this isn't a quick machine. A photo print took between 2:23 and 2:59, depending on the source of the image, which is also slow.

There are a lot of different ways of buying cartridges for the X5470. There’s a standard yield black and a standard yield tri-colour cartridge, but then there are high-yield versions of both these, too. You can also buy the standard yield black cartridge in a twin pack. Then there's the photo cartridge, which introduces an extra three colours to the basic cyan, magenta and yellow and you can buy this separately or in a combo pack, together with the standard colour cartridge.

The conclusion is that the Lexmark X5470 is a good looking all-in-one machine, in a chunky sort of way, is easy to set up and use and is quite feature-rich for its asking price. It's not that quick and doesn't print that well (particularly when printing colour graphics), but it's quite cheap to run, as some compensation.

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Lexmark is certainly making the most of its all-in-one printer design. The ‘box with a chunk cut out’ look of all its budget multifunction machines is continued in the X3480, though here there’s a small control panel added and memory card slots on the right of the front panel.

Here are some paragraphs form the review made by PcMag. The slots support most of the major formats of memory card, including xD and MicroDrive, but not the older SmartMedia. There's PictBridge too, so you can print directly from compatible digital camera.

A small LCD screen displays menu items and options in real English, which is an improvement over the simple indicator lights most machines in this price bracket use.

The X3480 feeds paper from a hopper at the back to a rather flimsy telescopic output tray at the front. It can also be used without a PC, printing out photos from a memory card or making photocopies from the scanner.

Although it has no colour LCD display to preview images, you can print out a sheet of thumbnails and choose (by ticking boxes) which ones to print, how many and the required size. Scan the sheet back into the X3480 and photos will be printed.

Prints from the single, three-colour ink cartridge are not too bad. Text comes out a sort of dark, bluey-grey rather than black, but photo prints are lively and reasonably lifelike.

With just a single cartridge to replace, print costs are variable. A text page costs just under 8p, which is high even for an inkjet printer, while a colour one, at around 23p, is pretty reasonable.

The main advantage Lexmark used to have over the opposition was price, but there are now several all-in-one printers in the £50 to £60 range, all of which print blacker text and several of which print cleaner photos.

Therefore, it's hard to recommend the X3480 against these devices.

Via pcmag.

The Lexmark X342n ($399 direct) makes a great first impression. With a metallic front panel that's set off by the dark-gray case surrounding it, it looks good enough to fit into the kind of office where décor matters. It also has the right price for an AIO for a small office, a busy home office, or a small workgroup in a larger office. And it can work as a standalone fax machine and copier, as it comes complete with both a flatbed scanner mounted on a monochrome laser printer and a 50-page automatic document feeder in the scanner lid. Unfortunately, what's inside the case isn't as well designed as the outside. Even though the X342n does a reasonably good job as a printer, fax machine, and copier, it delivers less than I'd expect for the price.

An AIO should let you take advantage of all of its capabilities. The X342n doesn't. In particular, you should be able to use it to fax from any PC on the network. But with the X342n, you have to print a document and fax the hard copy instead. This wastes paper, wastes time, and ensures that the faxed version won't be as readable as it would if you had faxed it directly from your hard drive. On an equally sour note, even though the Lexmark X342n lets you scan to a PC over your network, you have to jump though some unnecessary hoops to do that.

The X342n also drops the ball just a bit on paper-handling. It comes with a 250-sheet input tray, which should be enough for most small offices, and it offers a 550-sheet option ($199 direct) for a total 800-sheet capacity. But unlike the similarly priced Dell MFP Laser Printer 1815dn or the Editors' Choice Brother MFC-8860DN, it doesn't include a duplexer for printing on both sides of the page, even as an option.

The X342n's speed and output quality are acceptable, but nowhere near good enough to make up for its shortcomings. I clocked it on our business applications suite at a total of 12 minutes 9 seconds (timed with QualityLogic's hardware and software, www.qualitylogic.com). I'd call that tolerable but sluggish. The Dell 1815dn took about two-thirds the time, and the MFC-8860 took only a little over half as much.

Text quality is on the low side for a monochrome laser, but that's still good enough for almost anything short of desktop publishing. More than half of our test fonts were easily readable, with well-formed characters, at 5 points, and some were easily readable at 4 points. Only one heavily stylized font with thick strokes needed 10 points.

Graphics show obvious dithering, in the form of patterns in some levels of gray. I wouldn't hand them out to an important client or customer, but they are easily good enough for any internal business use. Photos also show dithering but are good enough for things such as client newsletters and printing Web pages.

Ultimately, the Lexmark X342n can do the job it's meant for: taking the place of a printer, fax machine, copier, and scanner. But it doesn't shine at any of these tasks, and it's easy to find other choices in its price range that do more, cost less, or both, making it hard to recommend the X342n at this price.

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