Lexmark X6170 All-In-One w/USB Cable Inkjet Printer (Lexmark-15K0186)

WHAT'S HOT: Lexmark loaded the X6170 with almost all the features you need for a small or home office, including full stand-alone and PC-based faxing capability, plus a 50-page automatic document feeder for copying or faxing stacks of papers. For so much capability, the $250 price tag seems like a bargain.

The X6170 provides a fairly rich set of fax features, including the ability to store 80 two-digit speed-dial numbers. It also performs group dialing; you can store up to 20 speed-dial settings for groups of fax numbers. Even better, you can set up your fax addresses on your PC with Lexmark's fax software, and then sync them to the X6170's flash memory. This undocumented handy feature, which a surprising number of fax-capable multifunction devices don't have, saves you from the laborious process of entering fax addresses on the MFP's control panel.

Overall, the X6170 was the fastest scanner on the chart.

WHAT'S NOT: The X6170's weak link is its print quality. It prints fairly clean text, though with a slightly grayish cast, but it disappointed us on graphics: Narrow parallel lines ran together to the point that they're indistinguishable; gray-scale photos on plain paper showed obvious banding, a grainy texture, and weak detail; and color on plain paper looked muted or foggy, with loss of detail. Even its high-resolution glossy photos have somewhat pale color, though they're sharp on detail and focus.

The automatic document feeder is useful, but even with it the X6170 has a major limitation: it can't collate copies of a multipage color document as a stand-alone device. The X6170 doesn't have enough memory to store scans of a multipage color document, and then print multiple copies of them sequentially. The X6170 can, however, store scans of black-and-white documents in on-board memory, and thus can generate multipage copies in collated order without being connected to a PC. To collate color copies, you have to operate the copy function from your PC, where the color scans are stored.

WHAT ELSE: Fax capability always adds some complexity to a multifunction printer's control panel, but Lexmark devised an interface that doesn't swamp you: Three mode buttons--Copy, Scan, and Fax--tell the X6170 what you're doing, and the menus on the LCD change to correspond to your activity. An Options button activates special features in each mode, such as Delay Send in fax mode, or N-up for copying several pages at reduced size onto one sheet.

Thanks to the automatic document feeder, you can copy or fax legal-size documents even though the scanner glass is letter-size. You can stock the X6170 with legal-size paper, or tell it to reduce or split copies and incoming faxes onto two sheets of letter-size paper.

Another handy trick is that the X6170 can distinguish between incoming faxes and phone calls, so you don't have to pay for an extra phone line for faxes; you can daisy-chain your answering machine to the device. Lexmark's setup poster and 100-page manual provide clear, detailed instructions to get you started and help you learn how to use the control panel, fax capabilities, and other features. The X6170 has a fax-forward feature that redirects your faxes, but you can't set it remotely while you're on the road.

Print and copy speeds were average overall. The X6170 printed text at 6.5 ppm, which was 1.5 pages faster than the test-bed average, though it printed graphics at a slightly below-average 0.4 ppm. Photocopying speed was slightly above the test-bed average.

The X6170 comes with Abbyy FineReader 5.0 Sprint Plus OCR for converting scanned documents into editable text, as well as Lexmark's limited photo editor and the All-in-One Center, a utility for configuring and operating the machine's various functions. Lexmark's PC fax software has only very basic cover-page capabilities.

UPSHOT: Small offices will like this do-everything device, if they can live with less than perfect text.

SUMMARY

Lexmark X6170 $