P6250

This good-looking Lexmark model has plenty of user-friendly features. It has a colour LCD, a memory card reader and supports PictBridge.

Its paper rests are permanently attached to the unit, which means that there are no extra fiddly bits when it comes time to set it up. It relies on a two-cartridge print system and does not have individual ink tanks for each colour. The machine has an internal space for a spare ink cartridge, and the scanner bed also has a cool little light indicating which way the paper should be placed for scanning.

During testing, this model was fairly quiet. We found the quality of the prints from the Lexmark to be a little biased to yellow and we also noticed banding in many areas of colour gradations. Because of this, photos may require some adjustment in an image editor before printing. Text printing was excellent though, with crisp and dark characters printing out in normal mode, while quick mode produced grey, yet very readable, characters.

In our tests, colour scans of glossy photos proved to be very detailed, with accurate colour tones. Greyscale images from our art book lacked detail, however, and even though we enabled the descreen filter to remove patterns produced by the source material, the scan suffered from these patterns throughout. OCR software also ships with the MFP and its results were excellent during our tests.

Photocopying text in normal mode produced copies that were quite sharp and easy to read, and only slightly lighter in tone than our original document. Colour photocopies were plagued by banding and colour issues, however, and took a very long time to complete.

The P6250 excels in user-friendliness. Its control panel has large buttons and clear labels for all the copy and scan functions, and the LCD makes it easy to print photos directly from the memory card reader. The supplied PC software, Lexmark Imaging Studio, offers an easy task-based interface for printing, scanning, copying and faxing (assuming your PC has a fax-modem).