It would appear that Lexmark wants to dominate the printer market in terms of sheer number of different products. The company is pumping out a seemingly never-ending stream of new products; one of the latest is yet another addition to the All in One product line; the X5250.

A popular choice where space is limited in either the office or home, such multi-function devices are an important part of the printer market, and with the X5250 Lexmark has combined the usual features with a good price.

Finished in the familiar Lexmark grey, black and silver, the X5250 offers a claimed 20ppm (pages per minute) for monochrome and 14ppm for colour printing, but remember that these figures are just engine speeds; when it comes to printing actual text or images the page count is often dramatically reduced. This is the case with just about all printers.

Copy speed is quoted at 15 monochrome or 9 colour copies per minute, the same speed, incidentally, as the X5250's larger sibling, the X5270. But once again, real life speeds will be slower. In our tests, five high quality, A4, mono copies took a shade under three minutes to copy, while an A4 magazine cover took around two minutes.

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Scanning resolution is a handy 600 x 2,400 dpi and it scans at 48-bit colour. Connection is via a USB 2.0 port and, as with so many USB devices these days, the cable isn't provided.

As standard the X5250 is a four-colour printer, but changing the regular tri-colour cartridge for the photo cartridge (not included) adds two more colours; light cyan and light magenta. The cartridges that come with the printer have an estimated life of 200 pages for the black cartridge and 190 for the standard tri-colour one. Higher capacity cartridges are available.

Although it doesn't have the memory card slots of a true photo printer, the X5250 does offer borderless prints and that photo cartridge option. Colour prints with the normal cartridge appear a little washed out, while swapping to the photo cartridge produces prints at the opposite extreme, with highly saturated colours. But as always with colour prints it's up to personal taste. There are no such problems with mono printing; text appears sharp and well defined.

Fitting the ink cartridges is a matter of lifting open the printer (there's a plastic prop to keep it open) and snapping them into place. There's no need for the usual 'which pattern is best' fiddling for head alignment as the printer automatically aligns the head and prints out a test pattern. It also tells you to switch to plain paper, if you have more expensive coated paper loaded, before it will print out the test pattern.

The X5250 doesn't need to be connected to a PC to work in the copy mode, with all functions carried out by buttons on the control panel and the LCD display. The control panel consists of eight buttons; Power, Colour copy, Mono copy, Cancel, Scan, Menu display and plus and minus buttons for scrolling through the LCD menu sections.

Lexmark's X5250 is a useful all rounder, probably better suited to producing mono prints than colour. That said, if you are looking for an All in One, the X5250 offers good value for money for home or small office use.