Product Reviews

This month sees yet another new Lexmark inkjet MFP with wireless printing built in, but for only £60. Build quality is sturdy with the exception of the flimsy extendable output tray, which tends to shed pages instead of holding them securely. A 2.5in LCD screen displays the printer's status and lets you control copying and direct printing from memory cards.

Even at draft quality, documents had dark, solid characters with only a few rough edges. At normal quality, our mono text prints took only 30 seconds longer than those in the draft test. Characters were blacker, but slight imperfections on individual characters were more obvious. However, the quality was generally good, and speeds were impressive.

The X4550 was much slower in our mixed colour print test, and took just over 26 minutes to print our 25-page colour document. Colours were accurate, but we noticed banding on large blocks of dark colour. Ink was slow to dry on standard 80gsm paper, and we noticed some bleeding between large areas of colour. The greyscale prints it produced were usable, but suffered from visible graining

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and banding.

Photos were vibrant and sharp. Some white backgrounds had a very faint yellow tint, but this effect wasn't severe enough to ruin flesh tones. Contrast was excellent, with vivid colours and deep blacks. Most of our colour photos came out well, but we noticed graining on light areas and pale skin in some of our pictures. Although the driver is easy to use, it didn't always accept our settings when we changed the paper size and enabled borderless printing.

Scans were detailed, without visible grain or banding. However, the maximum resolution of 600x1,200dpi is low compared to similarly priced MFPs such as HP's Photosmart 2575. Our low-resolution document scans were sharp and had accurate colours but when we scanned photos, skin tones appeared pale.

Mono A4 copies are produced in just 17 seconds, but while text is still legible, coloured titles and images suffer from graining, striping and inconsistent colour intensity. Colour copies were surprisingly slow, taking one minute and 30 seconds. They were better than the mono copies, although large blocks of colour were too pale.

The X4550 is economical to run if you buy high-yield ink cartridges, costing just 3p per colour page. It's also capable of printing high-quality text documents quickly. It can also print directly from various memory card formats and digital cameras with PictBridge. We're also fans of its ability to print wirelessly, particularly as the X4550 costs no more than non-wireless MFPs with similar specifications. Lexmark's X4550 is a good choice for home or home office use, but it's let down by slow colour print times and a scanner that's better suited to documents than photographs.