Lexmark P6250 review

The world is awash with all-in-ones.

In fact, we can't think of a single inkjet manufacturer that doesn't have one in its arsenal. That's great for us consumers. More choice means lower prices and better results. Doesn't it? Well, not here. Apparently keen to buck the trend, Lexmark has paired a scanner and printer and produced something almost totally underwhelming.

Working with the Lexmark P6250 is a very 'modal' experience. You must select a mode - scan, copy, photo card - and for some, scroll through a set of supplemental menus. Bizarrely, the default mode is 'photo card', even when the slots are empty, so dropping a document on the platter and hitting start doesn't copy, it just throws up an error.

We had some problems with the card reader, too. It wouldn't even look at the first two of our SD or SmartMedia cards, claiming they were corrupted, when they actually worked perfectly well in Canon and Olympus cameras. When we looked at the sample images stored in the printer's memory, our eMac threw up an error, warning that we had 'inserted a disk containing no volumes that Mac OS X can read'.

Using the card slots turned out to be a hit-and-miss affair and we eventually got them working with a card from a Sony DSC-U20 camera. This contained just six images, but because the P6250 insisted on trawling the card's trash folder, it actually saw 42 pictures. Of these it could access only the odd-numbered images, with every even numbered picture thrown out as a 'bad image'.

Once we got it to print from the card, things worked well. The on-screen display shows how your image will be cropped, and at standard-quality an A4 image is ready for hanging after just 46 seconds. It's not pretty if you're using the standard colour and black configuration, with bright blue clouds taking on a stormy complexion.

The photo cartridge was stubborn to say the least. We ran through the Lexmark head-cleaning utility 16 times, and eventually resorted to physically cleaning the nozzles with a soft cloth, but still couldn't get it to print solid bands of colour. That said, our top-quality photo results, printed using Lexmark's own premium glossy photo paper, were hard to fault. The colours were vibrant - although not quite so vivid as from some other printers - and the quality was pretty good, although by no means perfect.

Surprisingly, there was no evidence of any banding, although this is probably because the page moved such a small increment at a time that what was missed by some nozzles was picked up by the rest. What was unacceptable, though, was the length of time it took: 34 minutes 32 seconds.

Text, too, was slow. Even using the dedicated black cartridge, we were left waiting three minutes 11 seconds for five pages, which averages out at a tedious 38 seconds per page. Even then, the quality wasn't brilliant. While characters were dark, they were slightly feathered, although not to such an extent that you'd avoid using it for printing a letter.

Banding was particularly clear when copying in both mono and colour. On photocopier paper colours weren't particularly accurate, either, with a deep red being rendered dull brown, and a rich brown turned sepia. Still, it was fairly quick, at an average of 28 seconds a shot, and the countdown on the front-mounted screen was accurate, so at least we knew how long we still had to go. It also worked when not connected to our Mac, which was a bonus.

The scanning tools are supplemented by Abbyy OCR (optical character recognition) software for importing text documents into Word or another compatible wordprocessor, but they're not installed by default, and so the first time we tried to use them, we were referred back to the bundled disc. This is sloppy. Likewise, while the recognition was spot on, it paid no attention to the formatting of our document, completely discarding the layout in Word and rendering everything in Courier, with a carriage return at the end of each line. In Explorer, though, it was accurately reproduced.