Lexmark P6250 review

Many of the Lexmark inkjets that we've seen in the past have had angular, unusual styling. The off-white finish and contrasting silver-blue of this new multifunction device is more restful on the eye.

Its controls are arranged neatly on either side of a clear and crisp, 2.5in colour screen and it has an attractive menu system that most users will find easy to grasp.

Lexmark has added many features to the P6250 for the home photographer. To the right of the colour screen is a flap concealing a PictBridge USB port for connection to compatible digital cameras. There are also memory card slots for the seven most common formats. It's possible to make photo prints from any without a PC.

The P6250 comes with two, three-ink cartridges that give it six different ink colours. With this system, dots of faint cyan, magenta and black inks can be used to draw the lighter shades in a photo. This produces less grain than a normal four-ink system as each lighter dot of colour is less visible to the naked eye.

To test the 6250's photo talents we printed an A4 photograph onto Lexmark's Premium Glossy Photo Paper at its highest quality settings. Six-ink printers usually produce impressive photos, but although the print had accurate colours it wasn't the sharpest we've seen and we could even make out some graininess. It took the printer less than seven minutes to complete the task, which is reasonable.

With its photo cartridge left in place the Lexmark took nearly five minutes to print our five-page text document, and text wasn't quite solid black. With an optional black ink cartridge fitted, the same test took only 46 seconds - a fast rate, but the outline of black text still wasn't especially sharp.

The Lexmark's scanner took just 13.5 seconds to preview an A4 document, but at 2mins 17secs it was slow to scan it at 600 dots per inch (dpi). The colours of scanned images matched the original documents well, but there was a slight softness to outlines.

Photocopies suffered from a similar softening. In Normal mode, an A4 colour copy took 47secs, and a mono copy just 17.5secs.

The P6250 looks stylish and different, but delivers mediocre print quality and suffers from high running costs.

Author: Simon Handby