Like all the printers in the Lexmark Professional Series, the X7675 Professional ($199.99 direct) is aimed at office use—in this case, primarily small and home offices with light-duty printing needs. Like others in the series, notably the Lexmark X9575 Professional, it also offers photocentric features of more interest in a home setting than an office. The combination makes the printer a good candidate for a home office all-in-one (AIO) that doubles for home use as well.

The X7675 can serve as a standalone fax machine and copier, and can print, scan, and fax over a network. It can scan directly to a USB key; print Microsoft Office documents and PDF files directly from a USB key; and scan to e-mail, opening a message on your PC and adding the scan as an attachment. A 25-page automatic document feeder (ADF) makes it easy to scan, fax, or copy multipage documents at up to legal size—an important feature that almost any office needs at least occasionally.

Connection options include Ethernet and Wi-Fi, making it easy to share the printer on a home or small-office network. Photocentric features include the ability to print photos directly from memory cards and USB keys, using a 2.4-inch color LCD to preview photos before printing. You can also print directly from PictBridge cameras.

Paper handling is a mixed bag. The X7675 includes an automatic duplexer for printing on both sides of a page, a fairly sophisticated paper-handling feature. However, the input capacity is only 100 pages, which limits the printer to extremely light-duty use. By comparison, the similarly priced Editors' Choice HP Officejet J6480 All-in-One offers a 250-sheet capacity, which is much more appropriate for most small offices.

Setting up the 8.2-by-18.8-by-14.1-inch (HWD) X7675 is typical for an inkjet AIO, except that you have to run the automated installation program first, since there are no printed setup instructions. Instead, the instructions are shown on-screen, step by step. Although some people may like this approach, I find it annoying. I much prefer looking over the steps beforehand to preview the process. Ideally, Lexmark should provide a printed version along with the on-screen instructions.

In any case, the physical setup consists of little more than setting the printer in place, removing packing materials, installing the two ink cartridges—one black and one color—loading paper, and connecting a cable. I connected over a wired network, using a Windows XP system. According to Lexmark, the printer also ships with a full set of software for Windows XP x64, Vista, Vista x64, Windows 2000, and Mac OS 10.3.9 on PowerPC-based Macs only, and OS 10.4.4 and later on all Macs. In addition, it ships with printer and scan drivers (but no fax driver or other software) for Linux.

As you might expect from a printer meant for light-duty use, the X7675 is relatively slow. I timed it on our business applications suite (using QualityLogic's hardware and software for timing, www.qualitylogic.com) at a total of 23 minutes 24 seconds. That's substantially slower than the 17:44 total for the J6480 but acceptable for the kind of light-duty work the printer's meant for.

As with many inkjets, the X7675 gives you the choice of printing photos with either four ink colors or six. Because Lexmark expects that its users aren't likely to spend time swapping ink cartridges to print an occasional photo, I ran the tests with four colors, which generally yields faster speeds than printing with six. Even so, the photo speed was relatively slow, averaging 2:20 for each 4-by-6 and 4:20 for each 8-by-10. On the other hand, the J6480 was even slower for photos, at 2:42 and 6:19.

Output quality is uneven: below par for text, typical for graphics, and above par for photos. On our text tests, most of the fonts that you might use in a business document were both easily readable and well formed at 6 points, but one heavily stylized font with thick strokes couldn't pass either threshold at any size. In addition, one of the business fonts couldn't pass the threshold for being well formed at any size because of a character-spacing issue. The text quality is certainly good enough for most business documents printed at 10 and 12 points, but it's not suitable for documents with small fonts or for documents that need to look fully professional.

Graphics quality was good enough for any business purpose, including handouts for important clients. The only issue worth mention is that full-page graphics tended to curl the plain paper we use for our tests, so you might need to invest in a slightly more expensive, heavyweight paper.

Photo quality was a notch above what you'd expect from a local drugstore. I saw a slight but noticeable tint in a monochrome photo, but even that was within the range that many, if not most, people will find acceptable. I saw no problems worth mentioning in any of the color photos.

As with all of Lexmark's Professional Series printers, Lexmark offers high-capacity ink cartridges that ship with the printer. Lexmark claims a cost of 11.1 cents per color page and 5.1 cents per monochrome page with the high-yield cartridges. The two other features that go with the Professional Series are lifetime priority phone support and a five-year warranty.

With its slow speed and low paper capacity, the Lexmark X7675 Professional is obviously not as good a choice as the J6480 for people who print a lot. On the other hand, it offers more photocentric features than the J6480, including PictBridge support, for example. That makes X7675 an attractive choice for anyone with light-duty printing needs but heavy-duty requirements for features appropriate for both home and office.

Check out the Lexmark X7675 Professional's performance test results.

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