Lexmark X2250

The Lexmark X2250 is a simple and very inexpensive multifunction printer. The most obvious sacrifice it makes to achieve that price: the control panel on the dark, plain case has no LCD. In addition to the power button, it has buttons for scanning, copying in greyscale and colour, and setting the number of copies.

As a printer, the X2250 is mediocre. Text speeds during our tests were about average at 4.5ppm, but graphics printed at a woefully slow 0.5ppm. However, the X2250 printed attractive text; letterforms were dark, crisply edged, and legible down to very small sizes. Unfortunately, printing all of our other test documents produced results that were only fair. In a line art document, narrow lines were fuzzy and showed obvious banding. Colour graphics printed on plain paper looked too orange and lacked sharp detail. And while photos printed on glossy paper were vivid and realistic, the images still appeared grainy and out of focus.

The X2250 copied a page of text quickly in 16.8 seconds. Like most inkjet MFPs, the X2250 made copies that looked quite sharp. Scanning a 4" x 5" photo at 100dpi took 25 seconds, which was about average.

Scanning on the flatbed scanner was also very user-friendly. Touching the scan button on the front panel opens up the All-in-One Center software on the PC; there you can indicate the type of document you are scanning, and as a result the software will choose a corresponding resolution. Afterward you can edit the image with Lexmark's own photo editing software. The X2250 also includes an optical character recognition application, ABBYY FineReader 5.