Lexmark X5470 review

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Verdict:

Though it doesn't produce the best results, the Lexmark is excellent for the money.

Review Date: 18 Jan 2007

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Our Rating 5 stars out of 5

ExpertReviews Award

Review
Specs

With so many features and no major flaws, this is perfect for the cash-strapped office.

If Canon's PIXMA MP160 is affordable, Lexmark's X5470 is astonishingly good value for money. It's the cheapest MFD we've ever reviewed that has a fax-modem, automatic document feeder and a set of memory card slots.

This is a very easy device to set up. You need to fit two ink cartridges and clip the English language cover onto the control panel, after which the printer will automatically align its print heads. Lexmark's install program is quick and painless, prompting you for a test page to help confirm that everything has completed successfully.

Although the X5470 has a range of memory card slots, it has no colour preview screen, so you need to print a proof sheet before printing photos directly from a card. You mark the shots you want to print in a similar way to filling out a lottery ticket, before loading photo paper and scanning the sheet. It's an easy system to use, although the automatic red-eye removal option didn't work in our tests.

The X5470's automatic document feeder is the most basic of the group, with no proper output tray. It worked fine when copying a 10-page document and during our fax sending test, though. The X5470 isn't a fast copier, taking nearly nine minutes to complete the 10-page mono copy, but it sent two faxes in one minute and 46 seconds.

The X5470's scanner isn't up to the quality of a good stand-alone device, but it produced crisp, detailed images with accurate colours. It only struggled with gloomy regions in our test images, where it couldn't differentiate the darkest shades. Print quality was an improvement over many other Lexmark inkjets that we've reviewed, and more than acceptable for such an affordable device.

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