Lexmark X83 Multifunction Review

A Color Printer with Something Extra

With color ink-jet printer prices having fallen from bargain to commodity to free-with-PC-purchase, why would you pay $199 for an ink-jet today? To get a free flatbed color scanner and copier with purchase -- the deal Lexmark International offers with its new X83. The multifunction unit isn't the fastest or flashiest at any of its three duties, but its combo design saves desk space, it's simple enough for schoolkids to operate, and its output looks good enough for a small business.

The 15-pound X83 is naturally bulkier than most printers (an 18.5 by 21.5-inch footprint by 12.5 inches tall), but more compact than older multifunctions like HP's OfficeJet G series. It uses a USB cable (not included) to connect with Windows 98/Me/2000 PCs -- Mac compatibility is planned for later this year; no parallel or network port is available. Bundled software includes MGI's PhotoSuite 8.1 image editor, Abbyy Sprint 4.0 optical character recognition (OCR), and Black Ice Fax programs as well as Lexmark's talking Windows driver ("Printing started! Printing complete! Please load more paper!").

A near-vertical, 100-sheet paper tray is at the rear, permitting a nearly straight-through path (playground-slide path?) to the 50-sheet catch tray at the front. A hinged lid lifts up (or, for bulky books, comes off) to reveal the 8.5 by 11.5-inch scanner/copier glass.

A control panel at the right -- whose LCD display letters were a bit thin and faint for our aging eyes -- offers controls for the X83's walk-up, no-PC-required copying feature, including number of copies (1-99), lighter/darker contrast, reduce/enlarge (25-400 percent), paper type, and color or black copying, as well as quick, normal, and photo speed settings. "Scan To" and "Scan" buttons let you specify a target (a PC file, an application, e-mail attachment, or your fax modem) and then initiate a scan.

The included black and color ink cartridges snap into place in seconds, but the rest of the setup procedure could be smoother. The software installation opened and left no fewer than eight Explorer windows on our Win 98 desktop; on our first try, we clicked OK a bit too impatiently (not realizing one dialog box had temporarily appeared over another) and got a blue screen of death.

As we've experienced with other USB (Usually Stumbles and Balks) peripherals, the system needed a reboot to work properly ("Problem communicating with the printer!" intoned Mr. Lexmark). Even with these glitches, however, we were up and running within 20 minutes, though we subtract points for Lexmark's providing only a skimpy printed pamphlet and referring users to an Adobe Acrobat manual on CD-ROM.

As a printer, the X83 is smooth and not too noisy, though it's not the quietest ink-jet we've tested. Between the pop-up printer status panel (resident in the Windows system tray, alongside the scanner/copier panel) and applications' printer dialogs, it's easy to specify paper type (plain, coated, photo, envelope, transparency, or iron-on transfer); one of four print speed/resolution settings (draft 600 by 300 dpi, normal 600 by 600 dpi, high-resolution 1,200 by 1,200 dpi, maximum 2,400 by 1,200 dpi); or handy options like multiple-sheets-per-page handout or poster printing.

It's also easy to keep an eye on ink levels, which -- as with virtually all ink-jets -- tend to sink more quickly than you'd like. Lexmark rates its $31 black and $38 color replacement cartridges at 600 and 275 pages respectively (and notes that's at 600 by 600 dpi, while some competitors use lower resolutions), but we were a bit dismayed to see our color gauge one-third empty after fewer than 40 PowerPoint and Acrobat pages and various-size photos in our first day's testing. The unit's rated duty cycle is 3,000 pages per month.

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