Not great, but good

When I got a new computer, we got a new printer to go with it. My mother ended up buying this printer, which also happens to have a scanner. I think this feature was an afterthought for my mother, but it has come in useful. More on that later, though. We knew that we needed a long USB cable to connect it. (I don’t recall the exact length, but it has to be over six feet.) You do have to get your own cable, but that shouldn’t be any surprise to anyone who’s bought a printer in the past few years. Getting the cable wasn’t so bad as trying to hide it once we had it set up. Then again, that’s what beds are for.

Once we had it connected, we had to put the ink cartridges in. There are two cartridges. One is for color and the other is for black ink. (The numbers are 17 and 27 for those that have Lexmark printers.) If you’re thinking about ink refills, this tends to be hit or miss depending on where you get them refilled. We’ve had some refills that have worked pretty well.

The printer uses the same ‘test’ to calibrate the cartridges as our other Lexmark printer, but I’ve recently found out that this really isn’t absolutely necessary. To test the new cartridge, you print out a sheet and tell the program which of a series of numbered squares looks best. This is supposed to help the prints look better, but I don’t know that it does.

Feeding paper in is a little tricky. There’s a plastic back that pops up to hold the paper, but there’s a hole where paper can fit through. I’ve lost a few batches of paper behind the bookcase because I thought the paper was going in, but it wasn’t. Also, when printing, we’ve had to hold the paper in place sometimes. If we don’t, it will come out crooked. This generally hasn’t been much of a problem, though.

I haven’t had as much of a chance to do scanning. There were a few old family photos that I was able to scan in pretty well, although these are photos that have stood up well to the test of time. I have some more recent ones that haven’t done so well. As is to be expected, the scan quality wasn’t as good. Documents are pretty good quality, although I haven’t tried to scan as text. I vaguely recall it coming with software to decode text. I’ve never had a need for this.

If you’re trying to scan a newspaper or catalog, don’t expect great quality. This is another case of the output being limited to the input. Bear in mind that the printer may have used some sort of inkjet, which will severely limit your scan quality. I’ve gotten a few good scans with the scanner, but at a moderate scan resolution. It was good enough to send to friends and/or family, but not enough to do posters.

It’s not a five-star device, but definitely worthy of three or four stars. I think that even if we replaced this device with another printer, I’d still keep this one for scanning stuff. I do have some old pictures that I may get around to scanning. If you can get it on clearance, go for it. If not, don’t go out of your way to look for it.