Lexmark X2670 review

At £55 exc VAT the Lexmark X2670 is by no means the cheapest all-in-one we've seen recently – Canon's MP190 comes in at £39 - but don't be fooled into believing that makes it superior. It's about as bare as a multifunction device can be in terms of features, and offers the kind of performance that simply isn't worth paying for, even at that relatively low price.

For a start, there's no menu system on the device, with a single-digit LCD and a few buttons the only means of controlling how photocopies come out. This limits you to a paltry nine copies at a time, and don't expect to produce them at speed: our five colour copies at normal quality crawled onto the long, flimsy output tray in a staggeringly slow time of 9mins 16secs. There's no draft button for copies either, so mono documents are slow too; our test copy was produced in a time of 1min 31secs.

Five normal quality colour copies crawled out in a staggeringly slow time of 9mins 16secs

And even then the quality is disappointing. Draft text is pale and streaky, while normal mode failed to reproduce solid areas of black and offered only speckly text. In a side-by-side comparison, it was so poor our judges rated it on par with the Canon's draft mode for quality. Colour prints were an improvement, but a 6 x 4in photo took two minutes to print, and still needed a good few minutes to dry sufficiently for us to handle without it sticking to our fingers.

The scanner proved worse. Our range of test scans were consistently off-colour and full of image-spoiling noise, which in turn led to washed out copies with fuzzy text and a lack of any sort of vibrancy. Added to this, it's not a quick scanner, taking more than twice as long as the Canon to scan photos at 300ppi and 600ppi. It didn't even give the option to complete our 1,200ppi scan.

The Lexmark X2670 is by some distance the worst all-in-one we've tested. It's agonisingly slow, produces poor quality results in all areas, offers little in the way of useful features or elegant design, and the price isn't all that tempting either. And with its expensive cartridges its cost per A4 page is a ludicrous 22p, more than twice that of its rival. If your budget is tight, Canon's MP190 is a country mile better, and costs around two-thirds of the price.

Author: David Bayon