Buying a printer and a scanner separately could turn out to be the major pain. First, they both could be much space consuming, and second, you have to be the middleman on PC if you are planning to photocopy something. It is due to this reason why the multi-functional devices (MFD) are getting much popular now-a-days.

With the fax machine/printer/scanner all built into a single product, it might be the nifty pretty solution for the most offices. It saves not only the time but also the major space. We recently happened to came across the Lexmark X1150 MFD which contains a scanner and a printer (even a copier too), all in one.

The Unit

Lexmark X1150 appears pretty impressive with the sleek design and the grey exterior. The paper for this copier/printer can be loaded from the top, and the unit’s upper surface can be lifted up to show the flatbed scanner located inside. On the lower corner of the right hand of upper face, X1150 has 5 buttons for the single touch photocopy, single touch grey-scale photocopy, paper load for printer, and for the power supply.

For the photocopy function, X1150 have to be connected to the PC, which is a senseless thing considering that the other MFDs are able to use this function independently. As the unit doesn’t support the telephony functions, it needs a fax modem to be connected to the PC so as to use this as the fax printer.

The Printer

Lexmark X1150 prints at the color resolution of 4800×1200 dpi. We ran few standard tests on this unit at some highest quality print settings. One among them is the font test and it produced the results as below:

Font Test: A font test involved the printing of a document that is containing various fonts ranging from 24 point size and going all its way down to the point size 1.
Result: The line with the point size 1 came out unreadable and terribly dithered even with the magnifying glass. All the other letters throughout that document had some reddish outline, giving its text somewhat of a fuzzy effect.