Color MFPs prove capable and costly

The X762e unites a standard C762 printer with a scanner/ADF that also houses the MFP's control panel. The scanner module can sit atop the printer, but you must move it to an adjacent work surface to add an optional finisher.

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Most controls appear as icons on the control panel's LCD. Although the X762e lacks the feature depth of some systems, it still provides important capabilities such as edge-erase and combining originals of different sizes and orientations into one duplexed, collated job. You can create and preview fax cover pages on the LCD. And if you want to design your own document management systems based on the X762e, Lexmark sells a well-appointed SDK.

Lexmark's scan-to-PC feature seems unnecessarily convoluted. To initiate a scan-to-PC task, you have to go back to your PC, activate the template -- a link to the destination folder -- you want to use and then return to the X762e to scan. All other systems we tested allow you to store the scan-to-folder links at the device itself.

The machine's discount pricing shows most in its design and construction. The front door flips upward, forcing you to kneel beneath it; a chintzy wire bale props it open; and the door's single hinge feels flimsy. The paper trays are made of light, wiggly plastic. The ADF's output tray projects at just the right spot to bang your forehead as you fill the auxiliary tray.

The X762e's output quality is acceptable for general-office use. Printed text looked black and crisp, but large areas of color had a patchy look. Printed photos looked grainy and colors seemed pale. Copied text looked a little heavy and rough, as did copied graphics. Scans showed jagged edges in text and fuzziness in graphics and photos.

If you buy the X762e outright instead of leasing with a service contract, you'll need to feed it yourself. Based on Lexmark's cheapest toner cartridge -- the High-Yield Return Program version, which you return to Lexmark for remanufacturing -- you'll pay about 1.1 cents per page for black and about 8.8 cents for color. Lexmark can extend the standard one-year service contract to two years for $899, three years for $1,599, and four years for $2,499.

Ricoh Aficio 2238C

Ricoh's Aficio 2238C challenged the Xerox and Canon front-runners on image quality and most aspects of performance, but one cantankerous test file dragged down its rating. Still, its depth of features is undeniably the best of the lot -- even when thwarted by a sometimes-baffling interface design.

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The Aficio 2238C sports the fastest engine in the roundup, so its top-notch copy times -- 36.7 ppm for plain text and 20.3 ppm for graphics -- shouldn't surprise you. But typical office users print more than they copy, so we were disappointed when the Aficio 2238C's print times -- 15.1 ppm for plain text and 2.2 ppm for graphics -- lagged behind those of several machines with slower engines.

Blame the abysmal graphics speed on one of our test files, a two-page Excel 2003 document. The Aficio 2238C printed that file at wildly inconsistent speeds. Despite working closely with Ricoh, the problem remains a mystery. The machine performed well on our other graphics tests.

The Aficio 2238C astounded us by printing legible 1-point type. Even at normal sizes, letters looked crisp and black, and copied text looked almost as clean. The MFP's limited gray-scale range resulted in murky-looking monochrome graphics, whether printed or copied. Broad areas of color, such as pie-chart wedges, had somewhat uneven coverage, and color gradations showed somewhat abrupt transitions.