Are you being cheated?
For all the X83's good qualities, the high price of ink replacement will make it less of a bargain than it looks like at the store. If you buy ink cartridges at retail prices, you'll be paying about twice the cost per page than you would with some of HP's OfficeJet and Xerox's WorkCentre multifunction lines. Our sample pages cost US$O.11 cents per page of text and a whopping US$0.73 cents per colour page.
At least Lexmark isn't skimping on support. There's a one-year warranty with (here's a big plus) a toll-free technical-support line that's open 12 hours on weekdays (7am-7pm Mon-Fri EST). The Lexmark Web site also offers driver downloads, FAQs, user guides, an interactive knowledge base, and email support.
Lexmark's X83 multifunction offers good multifunction capabilities in an inexpensive, easy-to-use package. But for the long term, the device's high ink replacement costs could offset the initial savings.
The good: Inexpensive; excellent all-around print quality; speedy text printing; well-arranged front panel.
The bad: No standalone fax features; high cost per page; sluggish colour printing; no archiving software; no Windows 95 support; no USB cable included.
The bottom line: The X83 skips some fax features but performs well as a copier/printer with great-looking output. It's too bad the Lexmark's low price will eventually be overwhelmed by its high ink costs.
Lexmark X83
Company: Lexmark Australia
Ph: 1300 362 192
Price: AU$649
ZDNet Rating: 7 out of 10
How we rate products
Hardware
Printers
- Text and graphics print quality
- Print speed
- Cost of supplies such as paper and ink
- Paper capacity
For ink jet printers, we emphasise colour graphics quality. For laser printers, we emphasise text quality, speed, and paper handling.
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Multifunction printer speed Pages per minute (longer bars indicate better performance)
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Multifunction laser printer quality
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| The Lexmark X83 more than held its own against the competition, delivering the fastest text output of the three multifunctions we compared. On quality tests, it was nearly perfect, except for a slight hiccup on plain-paper text. |
13%
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