Product Reviews

This multifunction peripheral (MFP) comes from Lexmark's photo printer range. It has several memory card slots and takes two cartridges for six-ink printing. It looks good, but its low profile and paper output tray look like a Robot Wars entrant.

The P6350's colour screen displays a helpful animation that shows how to insert new ink cartridges, and a spotlight highlights the correct slots. The print heads are aligned automatically. Installing the software is straightforward, but the print driver has only three quality settings and virtually no advanced options.

The P6350's six-ink setup isn't ideal for black text, as it creates black from multiple colours. What's more, in this setup the fastest print mode isn't available, and the printer managed only 1.6 pages per minute (ppm) in our tests. With an optional black cartridge,

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the P6350 can use the Quick Print setting, which outputs pages at 13.6ppm.

We weren't impressed by the quality of printed text using either cartridge configuration. Character outlines were quite diffuse, with more jaggedness than we'd expect at high quality settings. Each page costs around 3.7p, so mono text printing isn't as cheap as it is with some inkjets. Colour pages cost about the same, though, which is very competitive. Unfortunately, Lexmark's photo cartridge costs over £16 and lasts for just 135 prints.

This MFP is designed for home photo printing and produces acceptable prints reasonably quickly. Photos showed little grain and good contrast, although in some test shots we could make out slight banding. Printing directly from a memory card was simple, but the slot was reluctant to accept and release our SD card.

Lexmark's TWAIN interface makes typical scan jobs easy, but you have to use an advanced settings page to scan at more than 300dpi. The scanner was very slow at high resolutions, taking four minutes and 36 seconds to capture a 6x4" photograph at 1,200 dots per inch (dpi). Colours were reproduced accurately and focus was reasonable, but detail was lost from the darkest areas of our tests.

The P6350's ease of use makes it suitable for novices, but it isn't ideal for printing lots of text. HP's PSC 1610 MFP doesn't have a colour preview screen, but it performs better and costs less.