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Lexmark’s laser MFPs can look old-fashioned, but its well-built devices are often a reliable budget choice. Although the X340’s bundled driver disc doesn’t support Vista and its squat styling looks dated, the low price and built-in fax make it a tempting choice. It has a modest 600x600dpi scanner, no automatic duplexer and only a USB connection, but its 15,000-page maximum monthly duty cycle is higher than that of most personal laser printers. Installation under Windows XP was simple, but the installation disc won’t autorun under Vista. Instead, we first had to connect the printer to our PC via USB and allow Vista to search for the drivers on the disc. Fortunately, they were correctly installed through this process, although the printer consistently failed to wake up correctly in our mono-page-from- sleep test sent from a Vista PC, instead printing a garbled stream of ASCII characters. The scanner’s software interface is basic, with limited auto-cropping capabilities. It helpfully stays open between scans, but there are few image optimisation settings. If you switch to ADF mode after scanning from the platen, scan settings aren’t reset automatically, so you’ll have to do this yourself. A4 images scanned from the platen at the maximum 600dpi resolution were pale and grainy. In our print tests, photos looked streaked and grainy next to those from Brother’s DCP-7030. Copy quality was also poor, with spidery text and dark images. Our first mono page took just nine seconds to emerge, and once the X340 was up to speed, it produced text at a fast 23.1ppm. However, it managed only 4.8ppm in our image-rich greyscale test. This wouldn’t be a problem if print quality was better, but smooth curves appeared jagged.
The X340 is a serviceable mono printer, but we were disappointed by mediocre scans and poor reproduction of graphs and images. At 2.2p per mono page, not counting the cost of the imaging drum, it’s also fairly expensive to run. Unless you really need the fax, we recommend Brother’s DCP-7030 instead.
