All that hype about the paperless office never came true, but the notion of the wireless office is rapidly taking hold as more small and home-based businesses replace wired LANs with WiFi networks. The Lexmark X6570, an 802.11g-enabled all-in-one makes cutting the Ethernet cable a very compelling proposition.

The X6570 uses the familiar two-cartridge, four-color ink system -- one cartridge for black ink, one tricolor cartridge with yellow, cyan, and magenta -- for everyday text and graphics jobs and casual photo printing. But you can also swap out the black for an optional photo cartridge, which turns the Lexmark into a six-color printer for richer, more accurate images.

Two memory-card slots on the front panel support a slew of digital-camera flash-card formats (CompactFlash, Memory Stick/Pro, Secure Digital, MultiMediaCard, and xD). Plus, there's a PictBridge USB port that allows you to plug in a compatible camera and print directly from its storage card without transferring pics to your PC. Another USB 2.0 port in back provides connection to a WiFi-free PC.

Automatic duplex (two-sided) printing is standard, as is a 25-page automatic document feeder (ADF) for multipage copying, scanning, and faxing. A paper sensor automatically detects what kind of paper you have loaded in the 100-page paper tray.

The X6570 comes with OCR (optical character recognition) software for converting scanned and faxed documents to editable text, as well as a useful application called Lexmark Productivity Studio. From the latter's control console, you can manage printing, scanning, copying, sending PC documents as faxes, scanning and sending documents as e-mail attachments, and converting documents to PDF files as well as turning pages to word processing files using OCR.