Review: Lexmark X85 All-In-One Print Center

Reviewed By: Kirk Hiner

Review Date: March 6, 2003

Product: USB ink jet printer, scanner, copier

Developer: Lexmark

Minimum Requirements: Mac OS 8.6 or Mac OS X v10.1, USB port

Specs: See full specs at Lexmark's website

Retail Price: $179.99

Availability: Out now

I opened my last Lexmark review with a quote from Benny Hill. I think I'll do the same here.

Fatricia was just pipteen
When she pell in love with Fete
He was pishing in the river
With galoshes on his peet

That, of course, has absolutely nothing to do with this review. I just think Benny Hill's funny.

Less funny, but still likable, is the new X85 All-In-One Print Center from Lexmark. All-In-Ones (AIOs) generally add scanning and copying capabilities to a unit traditionally reserved for printing, and with varying degrees of success. Lexmark themselves have been somewhat erratic in their success; The X73 AIO left quite a bit to be desired on the scanning and copying front, while the X75 PrinTrio offered some good quality and features to justify its price.

The price here weighs in the same as the X73 before it; $179.99. Now, considering that most general-use printers and scanners hover between $99 and $250 individually, this would seem like a good deal, right? Well, it is, provided you're willing to make a few concessions for the purpose of saving some money.

Let's first talk about form factor. Every time I receive a Lexmark ink jet for review, I always think they sent me an empty box. They're very light (15 lbs.) and compact. They take up no more space on your desktop than your average stand-alone scanner or printer. The paper loads into the top back behind the scanner bed, requiring just a couple more inches of desk area. However, printed sheets are expelled from the front bottom from which a small tray can be pulled out to catch them. Fully extended in this manner, the X85 is approximately 22" deep as opposed to 14.2" when fully closed.

Lexmark printers are starting to look better, too. The model I reviewed is a dark, sort of charcoal gray with silver trim, and the lines are all nicely curved. Without trying too hard, Lexmark has created a printer that looks good sitting next to a Quicksilver G4.

The scanner bed (which accommodates 8 1/2" x 11" or A4 sized paper and images) is easily accessed by flipping open the lid from the front of the printer, and the ink cartridges are reached by flipping down a panel on the front just above where the printed paper is expelled. Although this wide-open area is easy to reach into, it's also very deep; if you have the printer sitting on a desk, you will have to kneel or crouch down to be able to access the ink cartridge slots.

The LED readout and operator panel buttons are especially handy right away; you can take the first step of aligning the print heads after installing new ink cartridges without even turning on the computer. After that, installation continues the Lexmark trend of simplicity. Just insert the CD, launch the installer, connect the USB cable when prompted, and that's pretty much it. In fact, Mac OS X installation is so simple they don't even bother to detail it on the quick install sheet (Windows diagrams only).

The printer capabilities themselves are adequate. You can get up to 4800x1200 dpi print resolution, but that's pretty slow and doesn't yield results as nice as the same resolution on other Lexmark printers. The maximum speeds obtainable (in draft mode) are 12 pages per minute black and 6 ppm color. In this mode, though, precious little ink is actually laid down so the colors will appear faded. But hey, that's why they call it draft mode.

One annoying trait is the print dialogue box's habit of opening too low. It seemed to want to attach itself to the bottom of the screen, thereby hiding the print button behind the Dock. I could drag it up higher, but a few print jobs or a system restart later, it would go right back down. In this box, you get the same control over print elements you would expect. However, before you open that option, you're presented with a Microsoftian "I want to" button that pulls up the proper dialogue box for what you want to do. This guides the user into making choices appropriate for the task, and doesn't bother with settings that won't affect it too much. One bug I found with this is that, when trying to print from BBEdit v6.5, clicking the "I want to" button pulled up BBEdit's Markup window instead of the proper Lexmark options. Odd. I didn't encounter this bug when printing from any other applications.

The X85 supports many sizes and types of paper, including just about everything the small business would need. Where it proved itself during our testing period was in generating color proofs of web designs (at 72dpi, higher quality print capabilities aren't really necessary, anyway). That's not to say higher res prints don't look good, but rather that you just need to be realistic about the results that can be obtained from a low cost AIO printer.

Now, where you can expect a lot is from the X85's copy capabilities. 10 black and 3 color copies a minute may not seem like a lot, but it sure is at this price. It also boasts many nice features, including a zoom range of reduction to 25% to enlargement to 400%, poster copying (some paper assembly required), and the ability to clone an image up to 16 times on one page. The hardware automatically finds where on the scanner bed the image is placed, copies only that area, and repeats it on the page. It's very simple, although the copier did occasionally crop the image incorrectly.

The great thing is that all of this (with reduced numbers in some features) can be done while your Mac is off. Finally, we have an AIO where the copy feature actually behaves like a copier and not like a scanner. Quality, size, paper type, print color and more can all be controlled directly by the operator panel buttons on the printer itself, and the LED display clearly illustrates what you're doing or what needs to be done. Of course, there's no autofeed or other such standard stand-alone copier features, but no matter...the copier alone justifies the price of the X85.

This is good, too, because the scanner certainly doesn't. The quality and capabilities are of the variety you'd find in one of those scanners retailers like to give away with the purchase of...anything, really. Just last week, in fact, Popeye's tried to give me an HP with my chicken basket.

When scanning, you can tell the X85 if you want to scan to fax, e-mail, file, the clipboard, or to a destination program that you define. Oddly, you can't define to which e-mail program a scan will be sent; it has to be Apple's Mail program. You also still cannot scan from within an application using TWAIN; you have to launch the Lexmark Scan & Copy Utility or use the on panel buttons. There are basic settings where you can define the type of image being scanned, the dpi, and the color depth, and you can then move on to the advanced settings which allow for control of gamma, brightness, contrast, etc. This is a bit easier to manage than similar set-ups in Lexmark's past. As with the X73 before it, there's a preview mode here, but it doesn't offer an accurate representation of color and brightness. Getting a really good scan here has to be done through trial and error: Scan the image, see how it looks in Photoshop, made some changes, then go back to the Lexmark scan utility and mirror those changes to get a good, pure scan.

Of course, this is assuming you need this type of quality. Again, the X85 isn't aimed at graphics professionals, it's aimed at small businesses, students, and those who just want to occasionally print a birthday card, copy a rebate form or two, and scan some photos of the dog to e-mail to friends and relatives. For that crowd, the Lexmark X85 AIO is well suited. The results aren't stellar, but the machine is reliable and it's very simple to use. Although it greatly pains me to say it, sometimes that's more important. Of course, then maybe money's important as well, in which case the Lexmark X75 PrinTrio may be all you need, and it's now selling for only $99.95. You can use the money you've saved to buy some Benny Hill DVDs.

That Benny Hill, he makes me laugh.

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