BIOS: Technology Means Business

Lexmark's P6250 all-in-one printer has consumer-friendly features and all of the components you need to start a home photo lab. Unfortunately, its print quality is disappointing and it takes forever to print large documents. The unit makes it a snap to start making your own albums and digitising your existing photos, but you'll be disappointed by its 'photo quality' prints. In fact, its output can be bettered by much cheaper alternatives, such as Epson's Stylus CX3600.

Pros: Easy to use; large colour LCD; print countdown timer
Cons: Flawed print quality; painfully slow prints; fixed LCD monitor

The P6250 is Lexmark's latest attempt at a consumer photo printing solution. Designed to simplify the digital photo printing process, the P6250 (236x493x417mm, 4.8kg) includes features that help to make printing images quick and easy - with or without a computer. A particularly neat feature is a countdown timer that indicates how long it will take to output the print being processed. Another point of interest is that Lexmark claims its Evercolor inks will last for up to 65 years when using special paper and when archived under a glass display, and up to 200 years in a photo album.

The P6250 is a typical all-in-one printer - you can output borderless prints in six colours up to A4 in size, scan, and copy. Smaller businesses will miss a fax option and digital photographers will notice the lack of any bundled film or transparency adapters. You can print from your computer, or you can print images directly from a memory card, PictBridge-compatible digital camera or PC. The product's print engine offers a claimed print speed of up to 22ppm (draft, monochrome) and print resolutions up to 4800x1200dpi optimised, while the 48-bit scanner lets you copy and scan at up to just 1200x2400ppi. Unfortunately, there's no NIC, Bluetooth or Wi-Fi networking options, which may disappoint those with camera phones and PDAs.

One of the biggest strengths of the P6250 is its ease of use. A 2.5in. colour screen and 4x6in. photo scan guides make placement and previewing of photos easy, and a countdown timer makes tracking the print progress informative. The P6250 also includes blue LED lights that serve as a reminder of where the top left corner of your document should be placed when scanning a document, and the Accu-Feed paper handling system allows for easy switching of media (sensing technology automatically detects the loaded media type and adjusts the driver for the best possible output).

When changing ink, you can even store cartridges in a dug out 'garage' to prevent dry-out, and there's a transparent blue protector at the top of the printer that stops items - such as dropped pens - from falling into the printer. The memory card slots at the front also have a matching flip down blue panel to help guard from random objects making it into the holes - another feature that will be welcomed by parents.

Lexmark's Imaging Studio software is a breeze to use and provides basic tools for enhancing photographs on your computer. There's also built-in video instructions on the LCD monitor that visually walk you through the steps of replacing cartridges. On a less positive note, the LCD monitor is fixed and doesn't flip out for more convenient viewing, and changing the cartridges is a little fiddly because the top part of the unit doesn't lift very high. The P6250 uses a tri-colour cartridges too, which means you'll have to replace the whole cartridge if one colour runs out. Thankfully, there's a separate cartridge for black. When you want to output photo-quality prints, you have to swap the black cartridge for a dedicated photo cartridge, which is a further inconvenience.

The P6250 makes printing from a digital camera or computer relatively easy, but its print quality and speed is below par - even on a variety on media. Certain compromises have obviously been made, but its 6-colour printing system produces lifeless images that suffer heavily from banding (vertical lines) on regular paper. Dithering was less noticeable on high-quality paper using the software's default settings, and text quality on regular paper was actually very good, remaining tight and controlled with little evidence of bleeding. Areas of solid black appeared more grey, but this is a feature frequently seen with entry-level inkjet printers. In other words, you really do need to use expensive paper to get decent results from the P6250.

Print speed was also another significant issue. For example, an A4 photograph took 8m 53s to print at its highest resolution, and a 20-page presentation took a painstaking 27m 34s to print in draft mode. A high-quality 6x4in. photo printed in 2m 55s, whereas a 12-page PDF file took 12m 21s when printed in draft mode. The P6250 is full of positive features for entry-level users, but you'll be disappointed by its 'photo quality' prints.

About our tests:
BIOS uses a range of popular office-type documents to test the image quality and speed of printers and all-in-one devices. Our test suite comprises an A4 photograph (34MB, PSD format), 6x4in. photograph (5MB, PSD format), 12-page text file (90KB, RTF format), 12-page PDF (1.2MB) and 20-page presentation (2.5MB, PRZ format). For our throughput test we print a single dot onto multiple A4 pages. Unless otherwise indicated, printers are tested using default print settings. In all but the throughput test, the higher the number, the slower the printer. Print quality is subjectively analysed by the reviewer, based on experience and comparisons to printers we've previously tested.