Review rated by 8 Ciao members on average: helpful
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Upon discovering that replacement cartridges for my old printer woul have set me back almost £100, and as my scanner was beginning to flake out, I figured I'd kill the two birds with one stone. I paid about £50 for the X-1150, and now I know why.
On anything but super-low-quality printing takes so long that it's almost quicker to pop to your local copy shop and get them to do it. To add insult to injury, even on supposed "high quality" the printouts suffer from visible banding and dithering, and large blocks of solid colour are liable to result in ink splatters all over the place. Text output is passable, but if you're looking to print out photos you should look elsewhere.
So, how about the scanner? Sadly that fares just as badly as the printer. It's far from fast (although it's also not the slowest), and the resulting images suffer from muted colours, poorly defined edges, and end up looking like a bad passport photo.
The supplied software isn't too bad, although why they felt the need to make your computer speak the phrases "Printing started" and "Printing complete" in a really annoying American accent is beyond me. The scanner wizard is easy to use, and the printer settings are well laid out.
Physically the printer feels a bit flimsy, and the paper hopper makes it difficult to put pages in straight. This is exacerbated by the fact that opening the scanner lid tends to move the printer paper, and the pointless flap that folds over the paper feed has a habit of falling down and creasing the paper.
The "copy" feature is mind-bogglingly slow, and requires your PC to be turned on. It first scans the image (slowly) and then prints it out (very slowly), and the results are very poor. More of a gimmick than a feature, really...
Sure, it's cheap, but the X-1150 is not only one of the worst printers I've bought in a long time, the scanner is also next to useless. Unless you're on a really tight budget it's best avoided.
11.01.2005 20:21
I'll avoid this one then. John