Lexmark recently facelifted its line of all-in-one inkjet printers for home and school, and the X5650 sits firmly in the middle of that market. At a relatively low cost, the device is designed for printing, scanning, copying, photo printing and faxing. Even with the new look, the printing press has hardly changed compared to its predecessors.
Following Canon’s curved black and silver profiles, Lexmark uses mid-grey instead of silver and has designed its new device with an all-round effect that’s both functional and pleasing to the eye.
Lexmark has added a small handle on the right side of the product’s paper input tray to adjust the paper guides without having to move them by hand. We can’t see that as a major advantage and also wonder about the spring-loaded flap that sits in front of the shelf – as with so many newer Lexmark models. It doesn’t seem to do anything useful. We initially thought these flaps were to keep dust from falling into the feed mechanisms, but given the size of the gap between this flap and the paper, it must be pretty ineffective.
The most interesting thing about the front of the X5650 is its two-line status display, which appears to be a white-on-black LED panel rather than the more standard LCD. Although the size still limits the display to around 16 characters and longer messages require scrolling to be read, the display is much brighter and higher contrast than any LCD and is easy to read even in low light.
The control panel is well laid out, with four silver mode buttons on top, a power button on the left, and a start copy button on the right. Below that are the number pad, menu control and compartment keys for the address book, redial and other functions.
In addition to memory card slots for all common card types, the PictBridge slot also accepts a standard memory stick, which by default downloads all JPEG and TIF files found into a Lexmark application on your PC. It is also possible to use a proof sheet to select and print photos without a computer.
The Contact Image Sensor (CIS) scanner on the top scans optically at up to 600 x 1200 ppi and the 25 sheet Automatic Document Feeder (ADF) is clean and lays flat on top of the scanner. You can scan to a PC or a flash drive plugged directly into the device.
The X5650 runs with two cartridges, one black and the other tri-color, but you can replace the black cartridge with a tri-color photo cartridge to enhance pastel tones. Once you lift the scanner area of the device, these two cartridges snap into a head carriage in standard Lexmark fashion and are easy to service.
Along with its looks, the supporting software that comes with the X5650 has been revised. Although Abbyy Finereader’s copy is OCR as before, other applications have been streamlined so Productivity Studio handles things like scanning, OCR, email and fax, and more standard photo editing. You can also use this software to create posters and greeting cards.
At first glance, Lexmark seems to be becoming more realistic with its speed claims, as it now states 13 ppm for black and white printing and 3 ppm for colour. However, our five-page text print took 1:04 and its 20-page equivalent 3:02, yielding real-world black print speeds of 4.69ppm and 6.59ppm, still nowhere near published specs.
Part of this is due to increased rasterization times before the first page begins to print. We’ve seen pauses of up to 25 seconds before documents are printed, and this may be due to a new default setting that prints multi-page documents in reverse order, so they don’t need to be resorted.
Our five-page text and color graphics document took 3:18, a print speed of 0.30ppm – a tenth of what Lexmark says. A 15 x 10 cm photo print took 2:09 from a PictBridge camera, rising to 2:22 when sent from a PC.
Print quality remains one of the most important attributes of any printer, and the X5650’s results are only fair. The text is black and fairly well defined, although there is some blurring around the edge of the bold characters. Business graphics tend to look faded, although there is no evidence of banding and registration of black text over color is good.
Photo prints are still hampered by obvious points of dithering in large areas of color like the sky, but detail in darker shaded areas has been improved over some of the previous Lexmark all-in-ones we’ve examined.
The two standard ink cartridges are available in two capacities and as return program and non-return program versions, with a small discount on the return program parts if you agree to return them to Lexmark. When using the higher capacity XL cartridges we calculate a page cost of 3.88p for black and white printing and 7.53p for colour.
That cost is higher than the Lexmark X6575 we recently tested, for example, about 0.5p per page for black and closer to a cent per page for color.
verdict
Subjectively, the X5650 looks better than its predecessors, with a neater profile and a much easier to read display. The software has also been improved, but print speeds are slower than before, if at all, and print quality shows no noticeable improvement. If you compare the photo output to prints from Canon, Epson or HP printers, you’ll see where Lexmark continues to lag behind.
points in detail
print speed 6
functions 9
value 8
print quality 7