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Lexmark X83 Multifunction Review

A Casual-Use Champion

August 23, 2001
By Eric Grevstad

A Casual-Use Champion

The X83 is first and foremost a printer, and a good one, although we never got near its rated maximum speeds of 12 pages per minute black and 6 ppm color -- in fact, it reminded us of the old maxim, "To find an ink-jet printer's speed, take its advertised speed and divide by two." (Ditto for its advertised 3 color or 10 black copies per minute; we put a letter on the glass, pressed buttons for 10 black copies at the quickest speed, and were done in exactly two minutes.)

Our five-page, all-black-text (in various fonts and sizes) test document printed in 54 seconds (and three pages of plain Courier took 30 seconds) on plain paper at draft resolution. Text was nicely dark -- better than the grayish drafts we saw from Lexmark's $139 model Z53 printer -- and readable in 8-point if not quite 6-point size, though characters looked predictably a bit fuzzy as ink seeped into the paper.

Switching to normal mode (600 by 600 dpi), still on plain paper, took slightly longer (five pages in 1 minute and 15 seconds), but was no sharper. By contrast, 1,200 by 1,200 dpi text looked laser-like even on cheap paper, but the document took a plodding 7 minutes and 3 seconds. Graphics on plain paper were strictly for drafts, with visible banding in solid colors.

Like all ink-jets, the X83 responded miraculously to a diet of coated ink-jet paper rather than cheap copier stock: Normal-speed (600 by 600 dpi) text looked gorgeous, with our five pages appearing in 3 minutes and 20 seconds, and colorful charts and logos colors were solid, rich, and vivid.

As for photos, a 6 by 8-inch digital print looked great (and took 2 minutes and 20 seconds in normal mode) on coated paper. Switching to photo mode (1,200 by 1,200 dpi) on glossy photo paper raised the time to 4 minutes and 30 seconds, but the image, though darker, wasn't much sharper. Our 8 by 10 test image, however, looked best (and printed in 6 minutes, 23 seconds) in photo mode on photo paper; the ultimate 2,400 by 1,200 dpi mode took almost twice as long (11 minutes, 30 seconds) and didn't make a big difference in quality.

Stopwatch aside, we enjoyed the X83's convenient copying functions, including the ability to enlarge a photo into a larger print or to clone four, nine, or 16 copies of an image onto a sheet. And while it wouldn't satisfy print-shop pros, we found the 600 by 1,200 dpi, 48-bit color or 256-grayscale scanner worked fine for the kind of occasional photo or diagram import that a small-business newsletter publisher or family album- or school project-maker would need.

It took about 25 seconds to scan a 4 by 6-inch photo at the default setting (a low 150 dpi), while sharper scans took considerably longer -- just over 3 minutes at 600 dpi (one for the scanner to move under the pic, two for the X83 and our 750MHz Athlon PC to confer about it). Results, however, were pleasing, with accurate flesh tones and adequate detail.

We had a few scanning stumbles, however, when relying on the Lexmark's front-panel buttons without checking the Windows-system-tray scanner/copier utility (below). If your last job set the latter to text (OCR) mode, putting a photo on the glass and pressing "Scan to E-Mail" or "Scan to Application" will confuse the unit, which will sic its Abbyy OCR software on the image to no effect.

For that matter, consumers who happily try out their new scanner by slapping a book or a two-column magazine page on the glass and pushing the nice icon buttons will be rewarded with a word processing document full of garbage (um 'uo{ gqi su-ui noA SA^S I[IA\ mgqi IOUUBO UB3 'up[JOA\i3u). It turns out the Abbyy software can handle multicolumn text, but only if you launch it from the Start menu and proceed through its recognition steps manually instead of letting the Lexmark utilities do the work. Between that and the lack of a multipage document feeder, OCR text import is unquestionably the X83's weakest link.

Overall, the Lexmark X83 shows a couple of minor rough spots, and we think it's fair to call it an above-average printer that also steps in if you sometimes need a scanner or copier, rather than a full-fledged match for three dedicated devices. But it's an outstanding value -- remember, a flatbed multifunction would have cost you $700 just a couple of years ago. With a network port and a small boost in speed and duty cycle, it could even pass for a small-business workgroup center as well as a family and home-office hub.

Pros:

Relatively compact and remarkably low-priced for a flatbed printer/scanner/copier
High-quality ink-jet printing with extras like handout/poster/clone-image output
Convenient walk-up (PC-free) copying and top-panel controls

Cons:

Scanning, copying functions play second fiddle to printing
Fine for family jobs, but too slow for a busy business
Thin documentation hampers setup; some stumbles between control buttons and software control panels

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