Lexmark X6570 All-In-One Review

All that hype about the paperless office never came true, but the notion of the wireless office is rapidly taking hold as more small and home-based businesses replace wired LANs with WiFi networks. Products like the Lexmark X6570, an 802.11g-enabled all-in-one that costs just $150, make cutting the Ethernet cable a very compelling proposition.

the X6570 does just about everything except manufacture and sell your products for you. It's an inkjet printer that does a very creditable job of printing the occasional photo. It's also a color copier, a flatbed scanner, and a fax machine. And because it has a built-in WiFi print server, all of these functions are available to any computer on the network, wirelessly.

Lexmark claims the X6570 is good for printing up to 3,000 pages per month. That works out to 100 pages a day. Inflated ink prices keep us from recommending any inkjet printer for that volume of work, and we also have our doubts about using the Lexmark for a high volume of copying, which requires raising and lowering the scanner lid or using the sheet feeder. The unit just doesn't seem physically sturdy enough to stand up to that kind of constant handling.

But the X6570 would be great for a small office with relatively light printing and copying requirements. Indeed, it includes some surprisingly sophisticated features for such an inexpensive, multifunction product.

Four of One, Half a Dozen of the Other

For example, the X6570 uses the familiar two-cartridge, four-color ink system -- one cartridge for black ink, one tricolor cartridge with yellow, cyan, and magenta -- for everyday text and graphics jobs and casual photo printing. But you can also swap out the black for an optional photo cartridge, which turns the Lexmark into a six-color printer for richer, more accurate images.

Two memory-card slots on the front panel support a slew of digital-camera flash-card formats (CompactFlash, Memory Stick/Pro, Secure Digital, MultiMediaCard, and xD). Plus, there's a PictBridge USB port that allows you to plug in a compatible camera and print directly from its storage card without transferring pics to your PC. Another USB 2.0 port in back provides connection to a WiFi-free PC.

Automatic duplex (two-sided) printing is standard, as is a 25-page automatic document feeder (ADF) for multipage copying, scanning, and faxing. A paper sensor automatically detects what kind of paper you have loaded in the 100-page paper tray.

The X6570 comes with OCR (optical character recognition) software for converting scanned and faxed documents to editable text, as well as a useful application called Lexmark Productivity Studio. From the latter's control console, you can manage printing, scanning, copying, sending PC documents as faxes, scanning and sending documents as e-mail attachments, and converting documents to PDF files as well as turning pages to word processing files using OCR.

The Productivity Studio has one curious and annoying deficiency, however: It shows image files as thumbnails or as simply a list of filenames, but not as thumbnails with identifying filenames.

Installation Made Easy

The all-in-one's performance specs are also fairly impressive. Lexmark advertises print speeds of up to 28 pages per minute for black and 24 ppm in color, but that's strictly for draft mode -- which has print quality only acceptable for internal documents, and maybe not even then. In our real-world testing, documents with plenty of text and little white space averaged perhaps 6 ppm in normal mode.

Our out-of-the-box experience with the X6570 was very good. Setup, a potential headache for even single-function WiFi devices, was surprisingly simple, although you can't actually set up the unit on a network without first connecting it by USB cable to a network computer.

After you launch the installation procedure on a host PC using the included CD, the X6570's integrated WiFi system scans the airwaves for networks, finds yours (assuming it's set up correctly and working), and asks if it's the one you want to use. After you give the OK, a light behind the WiFi logo on the printer's front panel changes from orange to green. At this point you can disconnect the USB cable.

If the network in your office uses either a WPA encryption password or MAC address filtering that allows only specified devices to connect -- and you certainly should be using at least WPA -- this will introduce some additional complexity, but not a lot.

At this point, you could use the X6570 with the computer you used to set up the printer, just as you can connect to most wired printers using Windows' printer sharing. But that would mean you wouldn't be taking advantage of the Lexmark's print-server functionality, which lets you connect directly to the printer from anywhere on the network.