Although it's missing some fax features that many small offices and workgroups find useful, the Lexmark X502n produces fast, high-quality prints.

Design
The Lexmark X502n is a behemoth of a printer. It measures 53.4cm tall, 48.2cm wide and 43.7cm deep, and weighs 35kg. It's possible to move it yourself (speaking from experience) but not recommended, for fear of dropping the printer and breaking both it and your toes. The multifunction unit that sits on top of the printer comprises a flatbed scanner, an automatic document feeder and the control panel. The flatbed scanner is only big enough to scan A4/Letter-size originals, but using the ADF, you can scan Legal-size documents, too. The ADF can hold up to 35 pages.

The X502n comes with a 250-sheet input tray that can be configured to hold up to Legal-size paper. An optional 530-page drawer is available, too. Unfortunately, there's no manual feed slot, so one-off prints still have to go through the main drawer. The output well, located below the control panel, can hold up to 250 sheets.

The control panel is basic and well organised. Three buttons let you switch between copy, scan and fax tasks. For faxing, there's an alphanumeric keypad, 10 one-touch dial buttons (and a shift key, for a total of 20 one-touch numbers), and redial, hook and directory buttons. The standard reduce/enlarge, lighter/darker, image quality, menu-navigation keys and start and cancel buttons are all present and accounted for. Finally, the control panel includes a backlit, two-line text LCD for perusing menus.

The X502n uses four toner cartridges: black, cyan, magenta and yellow. Each cartridge is offered in regular- and high-capacity versions. The regular black yields about 2,500 prints and costs around £53 (ex. VAT), while the high-capacity version yields about 5,000 pages and costs around £80 (ex. VAT). Each regular colour cartridge produces about 1,500 pages and costs around £57 (ex. VAT), while the high-capacity versions yield about 3,000 pages and costs around £66 (ex. VAT). Using the high-capacity cartridges for best value, we estimate that black prints will cost about 1.6p per page, while colour prints will cost about 8.2p per page. Both costs are low.

Features
The Lexmark X502n features a 366MHz processor and 128MB of non-upgradeable memory. It offers both USB and Ethernet connectors, so it can be connected directly to a PC or on a network for a multiuser environment. The X502n prints, scans, copies and faxes and costs around £350 (ex. VAT); the X500n offers everything but faxing for around £275 (ex. VAT).

When copying, your options are standard: you can scale from 25 to 400 percent (preset or custom values); collate; and make 2-on-1 or 4-on-1 copies. There's no duplexer, though, so you can't make automatic double-sided prints.

Scanning presents a bit of a mystery. Although there's a scan task button on the control panel, we couldn't work out how to scan directly to a USB-attached PC. As it turns out, you can't. Walk-up scanning is limited to a networked X502n. For direct-attached scanning, you must initiate the task from your PC, either using Lexmark's Presto PageMagic software, which offers a wide range of options or WIA- or TWAIN-compliant software, such as Adobe's Photoshop. Using Presto PageMagic, you can scan files and open them in a variety of programs, including Acrobat, Word, Excel and Outlook, among others. If you want to be able to edit the document, you can avail yourself of the optical character-recognition component. You can save files in a wide variety of formats, including TIFF, JPEG and PDF.

The fax machine lets you save up to 20 Quick Dial (or one-touch) numbers and an additional 50 speed-dial numbers. Unfortunately, there's no group-dial option, although you can send fax blasts to up to 100 numbers (you have to manually dial each number or choose a quick-dial or speed-dial entry). A group-dial option is often important to workgroups, so this is a puzzling limitation. The X502n also lacks a secure-receive mode and junk-fax blocker.

Performance
The Lexmark X502n basically wiped the floor with the competition in our speed tests, including models that cost more. It cranked out black text at a rate of 19.71ppm (pages per minute), which was 5ppm faster than the Xerox Phaser 6115MFP/N. The X502n produced black graphics pages at a rate of 13.95ppm, a little slower than the Xerox, but still much faster than either the HP Colour LaserJet CM1017 or the Samsung CLX-3160FN. With colour printing, it was still the fastest of the pack, though not by such a wide margin: it produced colour text at 6.97ppm and colour graphics at 6.82ppm.

At scanning, the Lexmark X502n was again the fastest of the four by a good lead. It scored 6.30ppm for greyscale and 6.23ppm for colour. Finally, for copying using the automatic document feeder, it was a speed demon: 14.65ppm.

Often, great speeds come at the expense of quality, but happily this isn't the case with the Lexmark X502n. Its black text prints were basically perfect, which we would expect of a printer in this price range. Black graphics were also very good, marred only by faint horizontal lines. Colour text was nearly perfect, although very close inspection revealed some inconsistencies in character formation. Colour blending was very smooth, though. The colour graphics print was a bit more problematic, but very good nevertheless. Colour blocks were nicely saturated, gradients were smooth (although we saw banding in the greyscale gradient), and the photo elements were sharp and detailed. Our only big problems with this print were that the colours were a bit too ruddy and it had some problems handling barcode-style patterns.

The X502n's Achilles' heel is greyscale scanning. It did a pretty good job handling various patterns, but the scan was very overblown, with a faded look to it. None of the blacks were remotely black, and details were shot in the highlighted areas of photo elements. But the X502n did a better job with the colour scan. Colours were smoothly rendered and pleasing and details were sharp. The only problem was, again, its inability to handle the closely set lines of barcode graphics. Overall, we were very impressed by the X502n's quality. Only the HP Colour LaserJet CM1017 did better, but that particular model sacrifices speed to quality and is better suited for workgroups that need very high-quality graphics.

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