Lexmark X560n review

If you regularly need to print, copy and scan in colour and to fax, you may consider saving some desk space by buying a multi-function printer. With Lexmark's X560n, though, you'll still need quite a bit of room - this isn't a small machine.

Working from the top down, there's a substantial flatbed scanner, complete with a 50-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF), so you can copy multi-page documents. If you want to use the flatbed for bound documents - magazines or books - the ADF swings easily out of the way or lifts on an extending hinge.

The top surface of the printer has a deep depression, which enables it to handle large print jobs, and in front of this is the extensive control panel. The general look, while practical, is pretty clunky. There's a bank of 10 quick-dial numbers on the left-hand side of the machine, mirrored by a number pad for manual dialling on the right, as well as a couple of large buttons to start and stop a copy or fax job.

In the centre is an 85mm, backlit, mono LCD display, which appears bent on displaying toner cartridge levels by default. It can be persuaded to display other information such as the printer settings menu, of course, but perhaps copy settings would be a better default.

The paper tray that sits at the bottom of the printer is capable of taking 500 sheets, and a second tray of the same capacity is available as an option, as is a stand to set the X560n on. Sockets for USB, Ethernet and parallel connections, all of which are standard on this model, are on the back.

Pull down the front cover and you can see the four drum and toner cartridges, one for each colour, arranged vertically one above the other. Each has a small, projecting handle at either end and pushes securely into place as you slide the cartridge into its guides. With high-capacity cartridges - 10,000 pages for black and either 4000 or 10,000 pages for cyan, magenta and yellow - maintenance is conveniently infrequent.

A PostScript Level 3 Mac driver and Pantone tables are all the software support you get with the X560n - PC customers get a copy of Abby FineReader OCR, too, but there's no bundled equivalent. Worse than that, it's only possible to scan through the network connection, not USB, and then only by initiating the scan from the machine's control panel, with options limited to resolution and colour or black and white.

Lexmark rates the X560n at 30ppm for black pages and 20ppm for colour. Testing it on a five-page text document produced a real-life figure of 16ppm for black print, and that's not including a 13-second warm-up, if the printer has switched to sleep mode - which will be most of the time.

Although four pages is still the average length for an office document, there will be times when several copies are printed off at once or when the document exceeds the average, so we also tried a 20-page one. This produced a print speed of 22ppm, still some way short of the claimed figure.

Printing black text with colour graphics, another five-page test piece produced a speed of 12ppm, a 15 x 10cm photo took just under 20 seconds and a single-page copy from the glass took the same. Finally, a five-page copy from the ADF took a little under a minute. While these speeds may not be as good as the spec sheet, they're not at all bad, and so there shouldn't be queues waiting at this printer.

Print quality is above average, with sharp, crisp text and bold colours, where needed. They aren't always needed, of course, and this printer has the colour gamut to temper them down when printing photos. In fact, these are some of the best photo prints we've seen from a colour laser in recent months, with little of the 'seaside postcard' over-emphasis that a reduced colour range can sometimes produce.