The Xerox WorkCentre M950 is one of those products it would have been hard to imagine even a few years ago. But now this seemingly implausible trick has been refined to the point where it's cheap enough and good enough to bring these once specialist-only capabilities to anyone with some space and a few hundred pounds to spare.

What makes multi-function devices like the WorkCentre possible is the fact that you really only need two core components in the box to make everything work. The printing side of things - including photocopier output and hard copy of incoming faxes - is dealt with via an inkjet printer, which is a well-developed and consequently affordable technology.

Likewise, the electric eye at the heart of the scanner works equally well as the business end of a photocopier or the bit of a fax which reads your document into the machine ready for transmission.

This is what the WorkCentre actually is: a flatbed scanner/photocopier/fax-scanner sitting on top of an inkjet printer. The top flips up to reveal a glass platen familiar to anyone who's ever used a conventional photocopier, while the inkjet below is straightforward, even if you haven't seen one before.

It feeds on separate ink cartridges, one each for cyan, magenta, yellow and black, which is important for two reasons. First, inkjets that lack a true black have to fake it by mixing the CMY inks and the result is always muddy and unsatisfactory, not to mention a wasteful way of printing a black text page. Second, the combination cartridges used by some inkjets are rendered useless as soon as any one colour runs out.

Setting the WorkCentre up requires connecting it to your PC, either via the normal parallel cable, or by a USB cable. You then install a CD which gives you fax and photo editing applications plus an OCR (optical character reader) facility, which will try to convert scans or faxes into actual text that can be edited with a word processor or email application.

You can use the supplied software to make scans and then send them to different applications; for example, for editing or sending to others as attachments to an email, so you don't need to buy anything extra to make use of all the WorkCentre's features. However, you cannot send or receive faxes unless your PC has a modem.

Once you've got it going, the WorkCentre is relatively easy to use. It copies at the touch of a button on its own control panel, so you don't have to have your PC on to use this function, and scanning a document or fax is as simple as making a photocopy except that it's best controlled from the software on your PC.

The quality of the scans we made was surprisingly good for a multi-function device, and we were able to make scans of photographs that, when printed on glossy paper, came out looking reasonably decent next to the originals. This requires a respectable print engine, and the Xerox inkjet did a good job, handling business graphics well and producing crisp, clean text which could almost have come from a laser printer.

Print speeds were reasonable, with text-only pages at high-quality resolution emerging at 3.6 pages per minute, and a photo-quality colour page complete in five minutes. This makes the Xerox a bit average for text, but quite respectable with demanding photo-quality work.

The CMY cartridges cost £8.80 each, while the standard black is £15.50. Based on Xerox's own figures for cartridge life at the standard five per cent cover per page, the WorkCentre will cost 2.5p per page for colour and 3.9p per page for black text, which drops to 3p a page if you opt for the £21.14 high-capacity black cartridge. These costs aren't the lowest around, but the quality and reasonable speed on offer make an argument for swallowing the higher consumables cost.

SPECIFICATIONS:

• 1200 x 1200dpi resolution colour thermal inkjet printer
• Separate colour and black ink cartridges
• 600 x 600dpi resolution flatbed scanner (30-bit colour, 10-bit greyscale, TWAIN compliant)
• Colour photocopying up to legal size
• Faxing via host PC
• 150-sheet main feed tray
• 20-page document feeder for copier
• Parallel and USB connections
• Includes Xerox ControlCentre 2.0 management software, TextBridge Pro 9.0 OCR software and MGI Photosuite picture editing package.

Minimum requirements: Pentium 133Mhz host PC with 32Mb Ram, 40Mb free hard disk space and parallel or USB (Windows 98/2000 only) port.

Contact: Xerox
0800 787787
www.xerox.com