The Lexmark X9350 is the only all-in-one to offer wireless printing this month. It costs $276 and offers both 802.11g and Ethernet connections.

Running the setup application will con­figure it to connect to your wireless router – you have to initially use the bundled USB cable, but this should be redundant there­after. Once complete, any PC you subse­quently set up can print to it at similar speeds to a standard USB connection.

The X9350 uses Lexmark’s Evercolor 2 inks which have shown decent fade resistance when we’ve tested them before: they won’t fade noticeably within a week if you leave them on a table. But the X9350 produces prints with a little too much magenta. At least this gives them a bit of punch, though. Sadly, we had great difficulty getting it to feed 6 x 4in paper straight using the dedicated photo slot, so some of our test prints came out at a slightly skewed angle. Plus, it takes a minute or so before the ink is dry to the touch.

Much better was the quality of text, with normal mode in particular delivering clear and sharp characters. It’s not too slow at 6.1ppm, and it managed a decent 4.6ppm in our colour document, too, so it safely leaves the Epson in its wake. It also scans quicker than the Epson, only falling behind when copying.

The scan driver is a little simplistic in basic view; it would be nice to be able to permanently change to advanced view rather than manually selecting it each time.

The control panel features a number pad and a 2.5in colour screen so sending faxes is easy. The menu has a bewildering number of options, hence the huge manual that comes with it. But you won’t need to use many of them, and overall we were impressed with the quality and durability of the Lexmark in our tests.

You get a lot for your money and the low 9c per page running costs help make the value proposition even better. There are better photo-specialist all-in-ones this month but if you want a decent office-oriented model with the ability to print from multiple PCs, the X9350 is the best choice.