Product Reviews

Master of the 'early learning' style of all-in-one design and with printers apparently built up from a series of round-edged blocks, Lexmark has topped off its range with the X9575, a machine with all the trimmings, but a very similar print mechanism to many of its cheaper siblings. The printer is part of Lexmark's Professional Line and enjoys both a five-year replacement warranty and the inclusion of high-yield ink cartridges as standard.

The X9575 should fit in well with most Mac setups, as it comes cased in ice white, light grey, silver and smoked, black plastic. There's a 50-sheet Auto Document Feeder (ADF) on top, fitted to the lid of the flatbed scanner, a control panel in front of this and a 150-sheet paper tray below the controls. At the bottom right of the front panel are memory card slots for all the common types and at the back is a USB socket, another for a phone line and a stumpy aerial for the alternative, wifi connection.

Lexmark does particularly well with the design of its control panels. It provides similar control functions to its main rivals, but with fewer buttons, resulting in an easier to navigate panel. There's a built-in, 60mm LCD display, used for both photo preview and menu navigation, and a number pad for dialling fax numbers.

Supporting software is provided by the Lexmark 9500 Series Center that, while not being as sophisticated as the dedicated OCR and document management supplied for its PC customers, is adequate for printing to the machine and scanning from it.

When it comes to testing the printer's speed and output quality, you need to start by looking at the manufacturer's specifications. Lexmark is honest enough to quote print speeds in normal print mode as well as the industry standard

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draft mode, which bears little relation to the kind of printing most people do. The company quotes normal mode speeds of 11 pages per minute (ppm) for a black text page and 5ppm for colour.

We produced about half these speeds for our five-page test prints, with results of 6ppm and 2.2ppm, respectively. This is not a quick printer, though it does manage to do better than some of its rivals when printing duplex. Double-sided print has become more important recently, as it can save up to 50% of your paper costs, but on most machines it's hampered by the drying time of the inkjet inks. Before it can print the second side, the manufacturer needs to be sure the first side won't smudge.

The pigment-based inks used by Lexmark dry slightly quicker than the dyes used by, for example, Canon and HP, so the X9575 finished our 20-side text print in just over four and a half minutes, nearly twice as fast as a top-end Canon Pixma.

Print quality is not all that it could be. Even using Lexmark's latest EverColor 2 inks, text and graphics on plain paper look fuzzy, as the ink spreads along the paper fibres, something pigmented ink is meant to reduce. Colours are reasonably vivid, and black text printed over colour is well registered and shows no signs of extra bleed. Photocopying, even of colour originals, is good, though copies tend to come out with slightly lighter shades than the originals.

Photo output is generally good, though some colours come out darker than they should and you may need to compensate through software to get accurate prints.

Lexmark supplies its high-yield cartridges with the X9575 and these give better economy than the standard-capacity ones. The printer uses two cartridges, one black and one tri-colour, though you can replace the black cartridge with a tri-colour photo one for improved, six-colour photo printing.

Using Lexmark's published ISO page-yield figures gives page costs of 3.4p and 5.7p for black and colour pages, respectively. The colour cost is quite good for this class of machine, though the black print cost is on the high side.

Overall, while the X9575 is easy to use and has most of the features you might want, it's still the print quality that needs attention. In this context, the term Professional looks like a marketing tweak, rather than a technology upgrade.