Lexmark X4975ve

The X4975ve is part of Lexmark’s Professional range of multifunction printer/scanners, which means it comes with larger ink cartridges and a five-year warranty.

It looks clean and functional, with a silver case edge wrapping round the largely black body. There is a near-horizontal Automatic Document Feeder set on top, which makes scanning documents for Optical Character Recognition (OCR) much easier than using the standard glass flatbed scanner.

Paper feeds from a near vertical tray at the rear through to an extending output tray at the front. The control panel looked a little empty and one-sided, as there are no fax facilities in the X4975ve and hence no numeric keypad.

There is a 61mm colour screen, which can show thumbnails of photos as well as the menus. Controls for menu navigation sit to the right of the screen.

The front has memory card slots and a Pictbridge socket for printing direct from a plugged-in digital camera. The back has connections for USB and a home network. However, we suspect more people will use the wireless connection, also provided as standard.

To set this up it’s necessary to temporarily connect the machine through the USB socket first. Some of the printer's competitors have managed the wireless setup process without this step and it could be awkward if it’s hard to get your computer close to the printer.

Print speeds were below average, even for an inkjet, and much slower than Lexmark's claims: we measured just over 7 pages per minute (ppm) for black text and just under 2ppm for colour pictures. The X4975ve can print double-sided pages and at this it was better, at just under five sides per minute.

Print quality was generally OK, though black text is a bit more fuzzy than from rivals such as Canon and HP. Colour graphics are a little pale, though colour photocopies are surprisingly close to their originals. Colour scans from the flatbed are also good in this respect.

Using the larger ink cartridges supplied, one black and the other containing three colours, gives costs per page of 4.7p for black and 8.5p for colour. While the colour cost is reasonable for this class of machine, the black print cost is too high, as is the asking price for the device.