Lexmark P915 review

Printing out your photos should be a straightforward task.

But what if you can't be bothered to turn on your PC, connect your digital camera, transfer your photos and print them out one by one? Well Lexmark's P915 printer could be just what you are looking for.

It has a small colour LCD screen in the centre of its fascia to let you preview your photos. But the bonus is that you plug the memory card from your digital camera straight into the Lexmark and print directly from it. And if your camera supports the Pictbridge standard, you can plug its USB lead straight into the Lexmark and get printing.

Printing directly from a camera or memory card is a great little bonus, but it's not the only trump up the P915's sleeve. The Lexmark is a six-colour printer, which in theory means colours should look subtler and more true to life than those printed by a four-colour printer. It comes supplied with one colour cartridge and one photo cartridge.

To put the Lexmark to the test we printed our usual test photo on glossy photo paper. It took a reasonable, if not particularly speedy, 6 minutes and 25 seconds. Image quality was a bit of a let down though. Photos suffered from more grain than we would have liked, and there was some fine colour banding, which was most evident on skin tones.

Printing out text didn't favour the Lexmark any better. Our five-page document took 4 minutes and 30 seconds to print, and text was a touch spidery and indistinctly rendered. The test wasn't quite black enough either. Swapping the photo cartridge for an optional black ink cartridge saw the P915 churn out the same five pages in a much more brisk 44 seconds. This made the text a much deeper black, but it remained distinctly spidery.

In its favour the Lexmark is very easy to use. The front panel is clearly laid out and the decent-sized LCD screen makes navigating menus or printing direct from a memory card a cinch. The software supplied is straightforward too, and makes printing multiple photos nice and easy.

The good points end there though. The P915 doesn't have print quality worth shouting about, and despite its ease of use, we can't recommend a printer that doesn't print as well as similarly priced rivals.

Author: Sasha Muller