Lexmark P915

Cheap and easy-to-use photo kiosks, such as those offered by Boots and Kodak, are undoubtedly encouraging consumers to ditch photo printers with their pricey replacement cartridges. However, manufacturers are continuing to develop more sophisticated printers and, if you prefer creating hard-copy images at home, you now have plenty of devices to choose from.

The Lexmark P915 is a £100 photo printer that contains many features only featured in higher-priced models at the turn of the year. This includes printing directly from all memory card types and PictBridge-enabled digital cameras.

The bright colour screen on the front displays memory card image content and the buttons let you select the photos you'd like to print and the paper you wish to use. From here you can also perform basic cropping and resizing of photos.

Those with a computer can install the Lexmark Imaging Studio for a helping hand when printing. The main menu displays options for printing, sharing, browsing and editing photos, while maintenance options allow you to clean the cartridges and realign the print head if your prints aren't what they should be.

Printing images with specialised photo paper produced good results. Although slight banding could be seen up close, colours were generally bright and sharp.

The biggest problem, however, was print speed. To print a borderless A4 photo took a tedious 7min 24sec. Lexmark's claimed print speed for black text is 22 pages per minute, but we found the figure to be closer to six, and this was in its quickest printing mode, which produced faint text only really suited to draft printing.

The P915 is quite large when compared with its rivals. There's no USB cable supplied, but it does come with photo and colour cartridges loaded (priced at £18 and £16 respectively). An additional black cartridge costs £16, which will offer deeper tones when printing black text.

Contact: Lexmark 0870 444 0044
www.lexmark.co.uk

Also consider:
HP PhotoSmart 7260