The X9350 is a multi-function device that combines a sheet-fed scanner and copier, a colour printer and a fax, all in one unit. It's nicely designed, has a small footprint and best of all it gives the user a choice of three different ways to connect to it; via Wi-Fi, USB or Ethernet.

As soon as you get the X9350 out of the box you realise that someone has actually spent some time thinking about this product. From the helpful 'getting started' page, through to the comprehensive manuals and on to the beautiful design, it feels like a well built and well designed product that would fit in any office or home. Plus its small footprint (46.5 x 38.4 x 26.9cm) means it should fit anywhere.

The specifications for the individual parts of the X9350 are all top of the range; the Wi-Fi part uses 802.11g, the scanner will scan at 48-bit colour with 1,200 x 4,800dpi resolution, there's a built-in sheet feeder, there's a large, 6cm colour display to view pictures from the USB port, PictBridge connector or 7-way digital memory card slots, and the printer claims 4,800 x 1,200dpi with 32ppm (pages per minute) monochrome and 27ppm colour. As you'll see, though, these speed figures should be taken with a bowl of salt.

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Installation is quite simple, the setup CD giving you the option of installing the printer as a wireless printer, a network printer or as a dedicated USB device. To set it up as a Wi-Fi printer you first need to connect it via a USB connection to make sure it's pointing at the right network, then you disconnect the USB connection and it should be up and working. You then need to install the driver software on any other wireless-enabled computer that will be using the printer.

After choosing the connection and loading the Lexmark software, it then loads a configuration wizard to set up the basic fax sending and receiving part of the MFD. The wizard sets up the cover page information and how the fax works with your other telecoms devices, such as answering machines and DSL connections. You can then set speed dial information, junk fax blocking and further fax settings.

The initial software supplied with the Lexmark unit was quite ropey - it crashed the PC we tested it on at regular intervals - but once we'd upgraded to the latest drivers from the Lexmark site then things improved. However, the Presto PageManager software still caused problems, the biggest being speed, and we'd recommend that unless you have a fast machine and at least 1GB of RAM, you don't bother installing it.

Unfortunately another drawback of the software seemed to be an intermittent Wi-Fi connection. While the connection worked fine initially, we had trouble maintaining the connection and were unable to get to the bottom of the problem.

In our tests the Lexmark X9350 scanned a typical colour page at 70dpi in about 25 seconds and the sheet-feeder could comfortably deal with 40-page documents or more. When printing from the PC, a decent quality colour copy would take around 55 seconds and printing from a file took around 60 seconds for the first page and 35 seconds for each subsequent page.

Printing directly from the memory card reader or via the PictBridge connection seemed to make little difference; 57 seconds to print out a full page picture on the quick print setting, with standard paper, and a full 5 minutes for a best quality picture on glossy paper.

Quality wise the colour prints were very good, the colours lifelike and the definition and resolution excellent on both colour and monochrome documents.

Overall the Lexmark X9350 is a good quality device, however the software is probably too bloated, the speed claims for the printer could never be met, and at £249 the device is expensive. That said, there are very few other all-in-ones on the market that can come anywhere near the X9350's versatility and style.

The Lexmark gets full marks for its neat styling but is let down slightly by its slow print speed. However, it makes up for its drawbacks by bundling some very comprehensive scanning and printing software, including Abbyy's Finereader 6 OCR package.