Lexmark X3650 Home & Student 3-in-1 Review

At $79.99, the Lexmark X3650 Home & Student 3-in-1 is a decent all-in-one inkjet printer for the price. Best suited for home printing and scanning, and boasting a one-touch copying feature, this is an economical desktop companion.

Design

At 18.1 x 12.5 x 7.0 inches, the X3650 takes up a fair amount of desk space, and it lacks an LCD for photo viewing or editing. However, it boasts a one-touch copying feature for printing via its memory card slots or through PictBridge. The X3650 connects from your computer via USB, but a cable is not included.

Performance

In just about every aspect, the X3650 is a tad slower than the other all-in-one printers we've reviewed recently, but it's certainly not a deal breaker. Its startup time was a lengthy 42 seconds, half a minute longer than theCanon Pixma MP190's. Black-and-white documents printed at 22 ppm--a mediocre rate, but the quality was good. Color documents printed a little slower at 18 ppm, but they, too, looked almost as good as the original. A 4 x 6-inch photo took about 35 seconds to print and came out quite decent. The scanner was easy to use and produced strong results. Unfortunately the X3650 also was the noisiest of the all-in-ones we've tested when copying and printing.

The X3650 takes two separate ink cartridges (both standard and high-yield mono and tricolor), which are fairly expensive, ranging from $19.99 to $29.99. By comparison, you'll pay more up-front for theKodak ESP3($129), but its cartridges are about half the price of Lexmark's.

Verdict

The Lexmark X3650 is a solid all-in-one printer for students and home use. At $79.99, it ably performs all functions and as a bonus, it can print decent photos. If you don't mind giving up the memory card slot, the similarly rated Canon Pixma MP190 is $10 cheaper, and its ink cartridges are slightly less expensive. But if you've got a little extra room, and time isn't too much an issue, the X3650 will serve you well.