Product Reviews

We had high hopes for Lexmark's latest inkjet all-in-one, the X9350. Having been impressed with the X5470 at the end of last year, we fully expected to be equally impressed with its feature-packed sibling.

The X9350 is a scanner, fax machine, printer and copier in one elegant silver and white box. First impressions are excellent. It's solidly built, looks good and has just about every feature you could want: double-sided printing, memory card slots and a PictBridge port, a control panel and colour LCD, and USB, Ethernet and Wi-Fi connections. The 150-sheet input tray is complemented by a feeder for 6 x 4in prints and DL-sized envelopes, as well as a document feeder for the scanner. The X9350's other specs look impressive, too; 48-bit scanning, 4800 x 1200 print resolution, 32ppm for mono documents and 27ppm for colour.

Sadly, first impressions rarely last and, as far as the X9350 is concerned, they faded the minute we tried to set it up to print wirelessly. The supplied setup instructions are easy to follow, but hardly detailed, and they lack any decent troubleshooting information. That much became apparent as soon as the Lexmark setup Wizard returned an error telling

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us there was no device on the network, despite the fact that our Mac could see it. The same thing happened when we tried to set it up over Ethernet. A re-install of the drivers seemed like an obvious first step. With no obvious uninstaller, we manually removed the old drivers and re-installed them. No joy. Eventually, after two tech support calls to Lexmark failed to resolve the issue, we stumbled on the uninstaller, used it and re-installed the drivers. Joy. We could now print wirelessly and over Ethernet. However, that joy was short lived when we discovered that printing in this way was haphazard at best and often returned errors telling us the printer couldn't be found.

We persevered and tried printing 6 x 4in photos from an SD card. This process is thankfully simple: insert the card, scroll through the thumbnails on the 2.4in LCD and choose the one you want to print. Two minutes later, out pops the result: sadly, a dark, grainy, overly red image that displays white dots where the feed mechanism dug into the paper. Printing photos from iPhoto was no better.

There are more niggles. The 6 x 4in feeder is difficult to get to because it's hidden at the back of the input tray. And if there's paper in the photo input tray, the X9350 always uses it first, even if you're printing an A4 text page.

On the plus side, text quality is pretty good and output is speedy. And, thankfully, scanning and copying both worked well.

We wanted to like the X9350. It has some very neat features, is well built and looks pretty good. Sadly, the effort involved in coaxing anything from it at all far outweighs the prints that result.

The Lexmark X9350 is a long way from being ready for prime time and far from being worth £250. Best avoided.