Product Reviews

The Lexmark X5470 is an all-in-one, fully Mac-compatible device capable of functioning without a computer attached for many operations.

Lexmark seems to have spent a long time at the product design stage; this printer is physically quite different from previous designs. The extravagant curves, which took up unnecessary room, are replaced by compact straight lines, flat sides and a comprehensive hinged control panel. The end result is solid-looking, functional and attractive, and it performed all its tasks without hiccup.

From the start, the installer drives the printer setup and configuration more completely than we're used to seeing, but rather than being obtrusive it turned out to be quite helpful. Although we prefer email, faxing remains an important part of everyday business and the X5470 works well as a standalone send-and-receive, plain-paper fax machine. By default, documents are scanned to the printer's memory before sending and you can have confirmation reports printed afterwards. For dialling, it can work with PBX as well as standard tone and defunct pulse methods, so it should work happily within a corporate PBX phone network.

The automatic sheet-feeder built into the lid worked well for multiple-sheet faxing and standalone photocopying as well.

We've always been critical of printer output and older Lexmark inkjet printers haven't always done as well as we'd have liked. This device, however, did itself proud. It is an all-in-one device but Lexmark also bill it as a photo printer, and even though it didn't ship to us with the optional six-colour photo cartridges, it did a surprisingly good job with a high-quality digital photo. Some dedicated photo printers can manage better results, but not by much - and to be honest most people wouldn't spot the difference. This was a refreshing result.

It has a PictBridge USB port and a selection of memory card slots on the front. With camera memory cards, you can print a 'scan-back' proof sheet. Mark the photos you want, place it on the scanner, and the printer will pick out and print your selected photos automatically. This concept first appeared in HP devices, but it is good to see such a useful technique being accepted as a standard feature across the industry.

Although this is an inkjet device it seems designed for both busy office and home environments. It has a rated duty cycle of up to 3000 pages a month, but we reckon you'd find yourself spending a lot on ink of you tried reaching that level. Lexmark also offer Ethernet and wifi networking options for making it available as a printer and scanner across a network. We wouldn't necessarily call it a world-beater, but Lexmark's X5470 is a dependable and versatile performer, capable of everything from decent photo output to business-level faxing.