Photo All-In-One Printer 922

Dell's Photo All-in-One Printer 922 uses the same engine, drivers and case as the Lexmark X5270, and not surprisingly the two models perform almost identically.

In our tests, the Dell printed graphics at a slightly below-average 1ppm (page per minute), but it issued text quickly at a rate of 7.7ppm. It also scanned quickly: the 922 scanned a 4" x 5" photo at 100dpi in just 15 seconds.

The text the 922 printed was slightly jagged and looked dark, yet was legible down to very small sizes. Line art looked fairly crisp, though narrow parallel lines printed too thick and overlapped a lot. Colour graphics on plain paper looked faded and too orange, although blues appeared realistic. On glossy paper, photos also appeared too orange, but other colours seemed more realistic, and they retained detail well. Copies of a text document were sharp, but copies of plain-paper graphics looked faded.

The case is small and sleek, but the lid to the flatbed scanner feels flimsy and light. The console is bare-bones; for example, it lacks an LCD panel for setting the number of copies, changing the copy quality settings and so on. Next to the flatbed scanner, however, there are buttons for initiating scans and making copies.

Dell includes Lexmark's well-designed All-in-One Center, a driver for copying, sending a fax from a PC, and scanning to a specific application, file, email or fax. Based on the selection, the software sets the resolution. A print status box shows how much ink is left in the cartridges every time it prints.

The accompanying software can also be used to edit images or scan text to the included optical character recognition application, ABBYY FineReader 5.