HardwareCentral - Lexmark X75 PrinTrio Review

Lexmark X75 PrinTrio Review

Ho-Hum Printing, Handy Scanning and Copying

October 31, 2002
By Eric Grevstad

Ho-Hum Printing, Handy Scanning and Copying

Printing thousands of pages will also take plenty of time. Like every inkjet we've ever tested, the X75's real-world throughput falls well short of its rated speeds; more troubling is that its print quality also falls short of other affordable inkjets (from Lexmark and others) we've tried in the past year.

The PrinTrio offers four print quality modes -- Quick (600 by 300 dpi), Normal (600 by 600), Better (1,200 by 1,200), and Best (2,400 by 1,200). In Quick mode, our five-page, variety-of-fonts Microsoft Word test document printed in 1 minute and 4 seconds, with decidedly jagged, scratchy text; switching to Normal mode on plain copier paper took only slightly longer (1 minute 29 seconds), but looked much more legible, albeit more like many inkjets' draft modes.

Better mode was slightly crisper on plain paper, but awfully slow (6 minutes 43 seconds). Switching to coated inkjet paper improved text considerably, to quality fit for business correspondence, although our five-page document took an even five minutes in Normal mode.

Color graphics were disappointing on plain paper in any mode short of Best: Our six-page Adobe Acrobat PDF showed noticeable banding in both Normal (9 minutes 55 seconds) and Better (19 minutes) quality. Even on coated paper, printing the Acrobat file in Normal mode still resulted in stripey-looking solid colors (and took almost 12 minutes); it took Best mode and over 45 minutes to eliminate the banding.

We were also dismayed that in both Acrobat and Word, pages that mixed text and graphics had visibly bolder, more blotted-looking text than pages with text alone. (Our one-page business letter with colorful company logo took 1 minute and 44 seconds in Normal mode.) As for photo printing, using Paint Shop Pro to print an 8 by 10-inch digital camera image, Normal and even Better mode showed some banding, but Best mode looked vivid and sharp, and took 11 minutes 20 seconds, on both coated inkjet and glossy photo paper.

On the positive side, Lexmark's software driver offers plenty of easy-to-use options for both everyday paper and quality choices and more creative options such as duplex, booklet, or handout (N-up) printing. That goes double for the supplied scan and copy utility, which can open scanned images in a supplied, rather rudimentary image editor (crop, rotate, fix red-eye, add text, draw lines) or another program of your choice; clone two, three, four, or eight copies of an image onto a printed page; or turn it into a four-, nine-, or 16-sheet poster. A little exploration turns up some handy scanning-adjustment options, from specifying what's being scanned (a photo, text, or document with both) to where it'll wind up (on a Web page at 72 dpi, faxed at 100 dpi, or printed at 150 or 300 dpi). You can manually select a scan resolution (up to 9,600 dpi interpolated) or tinker with auto-crop, -sharpen, and gamma-correction settings.

The scanner isn't the fastest -- loading a 4 by 6-inch photo into the image editor took 15 seconds at 150 dpi or 25 seconds at 300 dpi, and scanning one page from a laser-printed Web-site article into the ABBYY OCR engine and then Word took 1 minute and 20 seconds -- but it's reasonably sharp and accurate (there were only two garbled words plus one dollar sign read as an S on the Word page).

We think families will enjoy the poster and multi-image printing options, though they'll get better results by using the software utility than from simply pushing the default-everything "color copy" or "black copy" buttons on top of the unit. And being able to put a photo or magazine (or even a slim book, thanks to the PrinTrio's hinged lid) on the flatbed glass remains far more convenient than the vending-machine-dollar-bill fiddling of trying to push a page or picture through a sheet-fed scanner.

Multifunction peripherals are nothing new, but an all-in-one for $149 will be an eyebrow-raiser until -- well, until Lexmark, HP, or Epson pares one down to $99. On the other hand, the X75 is likely to eat its weight (i.e., match its purchase price) in ink cartridges within six months' use, and its print speed and quality definitely say "home" rather than "home office." For most users, we'd suggest the slightly bulkier, $30-costlier model X85 instead.