Lexmark P915 review

Lexmark's P915 printer was announced in September 2004, but review samples have only just arrived at Shopper's labs.

Featuring a 2.5" LCD, a PictBridge USB port and a seven-in-one memory card reader, it's designed for the home digital photo enthusiast.

The P915 ships with two three-colour cartridges for six-ink printing. An optional high-yield black cartridge can speed up mono printing but, at 3.8p per page, this is expensive. The photo cartridge is rated for 135 pages and costs £18 to replace, which works out at a pretty steep 13p per page. Conversely, at 4.8p per page, the optional high-capacity colour cartridge is good value.

The P915 makes good use of its clear screen to enable easy setup. Open the printer front to insert a cartridge and it displays a graphical walkthrough. If the cartridges are changed, the printer automatically prompts you to print an alignment sheet. Direct printing is similarly clear and simple.

Using a black cartridge, the printer managed 12.3ppm on our 50-page document and 1.7ppm on our mixed-colour test. Both results would have placed it among the fastest printers in our Labs test of photo inkjets in Shopper, December 2004, but its print quality suffered from poor ink accuracy on plain paper. Text in particular was printed with a vague outline around it.

Photo printing was comparatively fast and, with six inks, the quality was quite good. Six borderless 6x4" photos took just under 18 minutes. Our test prints had accurate colours, but in some lighter areas we could make out grain and a small amount of banding.

This weakness is unlikely to bother novice users, however, who will appreciate the Lexmark's ease of use. The P915 is good value if you don't need crisp black text, but when using its low-capacity photo cartridge it's expensive to run.

Author: Simon Handby