Late Additions to Your Back-to-School List

All over campuses, parents have said their goodbyes, shed a tear or two for the empty nest back home and left their sons and daughters with enough gear to outfit the Russian Army.

This year, a study from the National Retail Federation says that parents and students will spend $25.7 billion on goods related to the return to college. But no matter how many hotpots, backpacks and laptops that students have, there's always something missing -- some crucial last-minute item that seems unnecessary. That is, until the second week of school, when everyone else is strolling around the quad with them.

This week, the Good Life heads back to school to look at six products -- from ramen to PDAs -- that you may be shipping off in a care package sooner than you think.

The Do-It-All Printer

Keep kids from late-night Kinko's runs with an all-in-one device that can do it all and then some, combining a printer, copy machine and flatbed scanner into a slim, compact unit.

These all-in-ones have been hot college items for a few years now, but the prices have plunged while the technology has improved, making printers faster, resolution sharper and performance more dependable. Lexmark's new X5270, at just $130, is a best-in-class model, employing a new cartridge system that uses six dye- and pigment-based inks to produce vibrant, photo-quality pictures that resist fading.

The printer's PrecisionSense function detects what kind of paper is in the machine and automatically adjusts the cartridge to produce maximum results. And, at just 17.4 inches wide and 12.6 inches deep, the X5270 has a very small footprint -- packing an exceptional number of features into a 10-pound unit that won't hog precious counter space.

The X5270 doesn't sacrifice speed for quality. This is a zippy unit, one of the fastest in its class, able to pump out 22 black-and-white pages per minute, and 15 pages per minute in color from its 100-sheet paper tray. The copy machine function is slower, only able to print 15 black-and-white copies a minute and nine color copies a minute, but that's still fast enough to keep kids away from the copy center at three in the morning.