Lexmark X1150

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Lexmark X1150

Gagan Gupta, May 21, 2004 0000 hrs IST

Buying a scanner and a printer separately can turn out to be a major pain.

Good scanner, Cost effective in the short-run

Slow printer, Bad print quality, Bad print economy

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Buying a scanner and a printer separately can turn out to be a major pain. Firstly, they both can be pretty space consuming, and secondly, you need to be a middleman on the PC if you're planning to just photocopy something. This is why multi-functional devices (MFDs) are getting so popular these days.

With a scanner/printer/fax machine all built into one, it can be a pretty nifty solution for most offices. It not only saves time but also some major space. We recently received the Lexmark X1150 MFD that contains a printer and a scanner (a copier too combining both), in one. Read on to find out more about it.

The Unit
The Lexmark X1150 looks pretty impressive with its grey exterior and sleek design. The paper for the printer/copier loads in from the top of the unit, and the upper surface of the unit can be lifted to show a flatbed scanner present inside. On the right hand lower corner of the upper face, the X1150 has five buttons for the power supply, paper load for the printer, one touch scan, one touch greyscale photocopy, and the last one for one-touch color photocopy.

Even for the photocopy function, the X1150 needs to be connected to a PC, which is quite senseless considering that other MFDs are capable of using this function independently. Since the unit does not support any telephony functions, you will need a fax modem connected to your PC in order to use this as a fax printer.

Since scanning and printing are the two major functions of the Lexmark X1150, the review has been divided accordingly.

The Printer
The Lexmark X1150 prints at a color resolution of 4800 x 1200 dpi. We ran our standard tests on it at the highest print quality setting (unless specified in the description). The following are the tests and their results:

Font Test: The font test consisted of printing a document containing various fonts starting from point size 24 going all the way down to point size 1.
Result: The last line came out terribly dithered and unreadable even with a magnifying glass. All letters throughout the document had a reddish outline, giving the text a somewhat fuzzy effect.