Lexmark X4850 review

Lexmark's X4850 is one of those all-in-one devices that tries to pack in everything you need to add to your PC for home and office tasks.

It's a combined inkjet printer and scanner that can make photocopies with a button press, automatically print two-sided (duplex) pages, and print photos directly from a digital camera, USB flash drive or memory card, as well as from your PC. It has a 2.5 inch colour screen and integrated Wi-Fi, so if you have a wireless router you can put it wherever you like in your home or office and print to it from other Wi-Fi devices, such as your laptop, without a cable.

The installer takes you through every step of setup, and gives you the option of connecting via USB or wirelessly. Both are easy to set up, but the scanner doesn't work across a wireless connection. That's probably no great loss, if you think about it.

At a fairly speedy 14 pages per minute, draft text prints were dark and legible, although some of the lettering was rather spindly. This wasn't at a problem at normal quality, which produced dense, solid characters in a minute and a half for 10 pages, with the first page taking 25 seconds to emerge. However, even after we'd re-aligned the print heads and cleaned the nozzles, the tops and bottoms of some letters were slightly out of kilter.

Colour prints were slow, but looked great, with sharp text and bright, accurate images. We were less happy with photos. Six 6x4 inch prints took just over nine minutes, and all looked either flat and lifeless or unnaturally oversaturated. Dark areas suffered from a marked purple tint, while paler images were grainy with poor shading. They took a long time to dry, and traces of ink still came off on our hands 24 hours later.

The scanner has a low resolution of 600x1200 dpi and a driver with only the most basic options, but our scans were accurately coloured, if grainy.

While the X4850 is easy to use and not too slow, we were disappointed by its print quality. WiFi and duplex are nice features, but not enough compensation for iffy text and low-quality photos.

Author: Kat Orphanides