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Review: Lexmark X75 PrinTrioReviewed By: Bill Stiteler Review Date: November 10, 2002
I think it was the name. "PrinTrio." Sounds like a new sub-SUV. Or a Genesis album. I wasn't expecting all that much from the Lexmark PrinTrio. Bad experiences with both inexpensive printers and scanner/printer combinations had left a sour taste in my mouth. You can imagine how I felt about a low-cost combo. Opening up the box and finding that the install disk didn't have the OS X drivers didn't help. Sighing, I cleared my desk of the scanner I use in creating a four-color newsletter and the small but reliable color inkjet printer I use for making proof copies before sending my Quark documents off to the print shop. I hooked up the PrinTrio and expected to be disappointed.
As for setup, the PrinTrio's relatively easy, but not a breeze. The USB port is located on the opposite side of the printer from the large, brick-like plug mechanism, making it awkward to maneuver the printer so that you can plug them both in. After navigating the company's website (pretty cleanly laid out) to get the printer drivers, I installed them as well as the AIO (all-in-one) software to control the scanner. The software asks several questions about what kind of cartridges you have installed in the printer, walks you through the process of getting your Mac to recognize it, and offers a variety of calibration techniques. On my initial install (OS X 10.1), however, I had to restart before I could actually print new documents. Strange. Obviously it was recognizing the printer; it spat out the test page. But I couldn't print any other docs. Printing in black and white and greyscale is great. Color printing is also excellent, on the high-quality setting. While printing pictures from iPhoto onto Kodak gloss paper, the results were practically indistinguishable from a commercially-processed picture. On the standard setting, however, the colors were still very vibrant, but the printing "rows" were easily visible. Another problem with printing pictures; the Lexmark utility program comes with a graphic gauge of how much ink is supposed to be left in your cartridges. However, when my printouts started losing their blue component, I checked the utility and was told I still had half a cartridge left. Also, when printing out several pages of photos, ink from one page would spread on to the page which landed above it. The PrinTrio's scanner can be a bit awkward to use, since to give it a smaller footprint, it has a landscape orientation. Large enough for a standard-size sheet of paper, the scanning bed is small but mighty. While I doubt it will replace the big drum jobs at a professional printers, it was able to produce several quality scans for my newsletter, with a good degree of contrast and color. Accessing the scanner's high-res functions, however, involves going into the All-In-One utility application, which took a bit of hunting around to find (in fairness, I believe that the install app put an alias to this on the desktop, but I hate having aliases there, and no doubt deleted it). The scanning utility gives you several default options, but a single button click takes you to more advanced controls for higher resolution, and more control over how the image is processed. As either an economy-model printer or scanner, the PrinTrio is well worth the $150 price tag (and is also a tremendous improvement over the Lexmark X73 All-In-One Print Center. As a combo, it's going to be hard to beat in the low-end options. The biggest stumbling block for most consumers, is going to be that "PrinTrio" name. I suggest the following options, free of charge:
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I was not. In fact, in terms of cost and functionality, the PrinTrio may be one of the best hardware deals I've seen in a long time.