Lexmark X75 PrinTrio Review

A Complete Desk Set for $149

PC vendors lie awake nights over the ever-shrinking profits left by ever-lower prices. Detroit automakers wonder if they'll ever be able to put the genie of zero-percent financing deals back in the bottle. But those guys are charging a fortune compared to inkjet printer makers -- who've first seen their products plunge from $400-plus to $199 to $149 and less, and now find themselves cutting all-in-one printer/scanner/copiers to the same shockingly low prices.

A bit over a year ago, we reviewed the Lexmark X83, which combined a color printer with flatbed scanner and copier for $199. That unit's been replaced by the X85, which boasts 4,800 by 1,200 dpi resolution on photo paper and costs $179. But for real bargain-hunting, desk-space-saving home users, Lexmark's new X75 PrinTrio (named for its print/scan/copy functionality) is just $149, and even more compact -- only half as tall as the X85, and barely bigger than a single-purpose printer at 18.1 by 13.3 by 6.6 inches (though the flip-up input and pull-out output trays add seven or eight inches of height and depth, respectively).

The PrinTrio doesn't claim to be a fancy photo printer -- it uses conventional black and tricolor instead of separate color ink cartridges -- but offers up to 2,400 by 1,200 dpi output, at advertised speeds up to 11 ppm in black and 6 ppm in color. Its letter-sized flatbed scanner has no sheet feeder for multipage documents, but performs 12-bit (4,096-level) grayscale and 48-bit color scanning at 600 by 1,200 dpi resolution (9,600 dpi via software interpolation).

And it doesn't have the walk-up (PC turned off) copier ability of its big brother, but promises up to 9 black or 4 color copies per minute, letting you request up to 99 copies at 25 to 400 percent zoom. Lexmark even throws in optical character recognition (OCR) software and a utility to scan and send documents via your PC's fax modem, though the PrinTrio has no fax hardware of its own.

Painless Setup, Costly Cartridges

Though rated for a small-office-shareworthy duty cycle of 3,000 pages per month, the X75 has a single USB 1.1 (no parallel or network) interface. The box contains a CD with Windows 98/Me/2000/XP drivers; Mac OS drivers are available online, and a USB cable is not included.

Setup is as simple as removing a couple of pieces of tape, plugging the AC adapter brick into the back of the unit, and opening the case (lifting the entire scanner unit, not just its lid) to snap in the two ink cartridges; we were briefly rattled when we couldn't reclose the unit, but discovered you need to poke a car-hood-style prop that holds it open. Like other Lexmark printers, the PrinTrio has a near-vertical, 100-sheet input tray at the rear and a face-up, 50-sheet catch tray at the front; the straight-through paper path does a fine job of preventing jams, though we've repeatedly found Lexmarks a bit more prone to skewing than rivals with horizontal input trays.

While inkjet printers have plunged to fire-sale prices, inkjet refills continue to be a windfall profit center. Lexmark rates the PrinTrio's petite black ($28) and color ($35) ink cartridges for 410 and 275 pages, respectively -- that's 6.8 and 12.7 cents per page, not counting paper -- so printing anywhere near the unit's rated duty-cycle volume will be a very pricey proposition.