Lexmark X2650 review

Lexmark's X2650 is the cheapest MFP here, and this is reflected in its build quality. The ink cartridge holders and scanner lid are lightweight and feel flimsy.

Its performance in our print tests was generally good. At 8.6ppm, it had the second fastest correspondence-quality document print speed here. Text was solid, dark and clear. Draft prints emerged at a relatively slow 11.3ppm but looked good enough for most day-to-day print jobs, with text that was only slightly less defined than standard quality. The illustrations and graphs in our mixed-colour document test were bright and clear, but were painfully slow to print; we waited half an hour for 25 pages. Photo print quality was poor. Light colours were bright and vivid, but prints looked grainy. The ink also came off on our hands even a couple of days after the print had been made.

The X2650 has a limited range of features. It has no screen, PictBridge port or memory card slots. You're limited to a maximum of nine photocopies, using the single button to cycle through the number of copies you want. Colour copies had a yellow tint and mono copies were grainy, but both were usable.

The scanner has a maximum resolution of 600x1,200dpi, which is sufficient for high-quality document capture but not high enough to scan photos for editing. It captured fine detail precisely, but photo scans were too dark.

The X2650 is one of the cheapest MFPs around, and can produce surprisingly attractive prints. Unfortunately, its extraordinarily high print costs make it impossible to recommend. A mixed-colour page costs 16.2p and even a standard page of black text costs 7p. Replacing both ink cartridges (around £12 for the black cartridge and £13 for the colour cartridge) costs almost as much as buying the printer.

If you need a cheap MFP and you will be printing few pages, the X2650 is acceptable, but spending more initially can get you a more economical device, such as HP's Photosmart C4380, which will cost you less over its life.

Author: Kat Orphanides