Product Reviews

Sitting next to your PC is the traditional place for a printer, but now that wireless networks let us wander around with our laptops, it's a pain to have to go back to print. A wireless printer solves the problem: click Print from wherever you are and, via the magic of WiFi, your document will be waiting in the output tray next time you're passing.

It's not new technology, but until now it's mostly been an optional extra on pricier printers, or, to put it bluntly, yet another way to extract a few extra quid from us consumers. Lexmark's new range of wireless-capable printers aims to change that by putting the technology in very affordable models. The X4550 can be bought for just £59, yet it not only prints wirelessly, but also copies and scans.

Preparing

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the printer to connect to your wireless network presents something of a chicken-and-egg problem, which is solved by using a USB cable for the initial setup. Rather generously, Lexmark includes a cable in the box, and the supplied CD contains a superb wizard that guides you effortlessly through the process. After that you can use the cable for something else and enjoy your new-found freedom. The printer has a light on the front that glows different colours to tell you if anything's gone wrong with the connection, but nothing did.

Two ink cartridges provide a total of four colours, and there's an optional photo cartridge to install in place of the standard black if you want better image quality. Unfortunately, quality was inconsistent. We got clean and bright results from the tri-colour cartridge, but grainy and yellowish prints when we switched to photo. The scanner produced superb colours but seemed slightly out of focus, which also affected copies.

Black-and-white documents emerged at a decent rate of 8.8ppm (pages per minute) at normal quality, but colour was very slow, just 2.8ppm on our test pages. The scanner took over a minute to scan a photo at 600dpi, but then just 26 seconds at 1,200dpi, which was puzzling.

If wireless printing appeals, and you don't need high-quality scanning or photo printing, the X4550 is worth considering.