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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