Edmonton / Despite the inroads of digital technology and promises of a paperless world, printing at home or the office is still popular and here to stay. The newest home printers offer a bigger bang for your buck with cost-saving features, and the ability to print from more places, including wirelessly.

And most importantly for penny pinchers, it is full duplex capable, meaning it can print on two sides of paper, automatically flipping the page around for sequential print jobs.

Setting up the printer in a wireless environment does, however, take patience and you must follow the included directions, especially if you have wireless network security set up with your wireless router.

To start, you have to physically connect the printer to a computer and choose between a wireless (for a single wireless laptop) or wired network connection, depending on whether you have more than one PC at home.

Once done, the printer worked great, being able to print from my laptop from anywhere at home. There is a small lag time but it's a lot faster than having to walk to a physically connected printer.

The only feature not available in a wireless connection is being able to send files from the printer's multi-disk memory reader, which also includes USB sticks and connected digital cameras.

Although you can print directly to the printer from these media with ample controls -- along with editing functions and size choices -- getting these files to your PC requires a direct connection.

As an all-in-one, the X9350 is well thought-out, with fax (requires a physical phone connection), scan, copy and print features. A 50-page feed tray and the ability to print on just about anything, including business cards, postcards and photographic paper, make it useful, even in a busy household.

It is ink-jet based, so don't expect laser speeds. As is the case with its competitors, the boasted 30 pages per minute in black or 25 pages in colour is under ideal conditions, and is still one-third the speed of laser models.

The document print quality is average, but I found the printer slows down considerably when set to best quality, the Achilles heel for ink-jet printers.

Although documents have rich colour, the Lexmark's photo-printing quality -- not its strength -- improves when using the six-colour cartridge combo, essentially replacing the black cartridge with three more colours, but the prints require hours to dry, a small price for those wanting a do-it-all wireless printer. Available at Future Shop and Best Buy.

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