LEXMARK P315 review

Lexmark is the last of the four major inkjet manufacturers to release a dedicated 6x4" photo printer.

The P315 is compact but larger than Epson's PictureMate and nearly twice the size of HP's Photosmart 375, which we reviewed in What's New, Computer Shopper April 2005. Its retractable handle makes it easy to carry around, but it must still be used with mains power.

Despite their diminutive size, other 6x4" printers we've reviewed have retained the connections we would expect from a full-sized photo printer. However, in shrinking the P315, Lexmark has thrown out the baby with the bath water. Although it will read seven memory card formats and has a PictBridge port, there is no interface to connect it to a PC.

Lexmark's marketing material suggests this makes the P315 easy to use, which is true, but it can be used only to make direct prints. Many competing products offer equally simple direct features and if more advanced image editing is required, they can be connected to a PC and used as a printer.

The P315 isn't helped by its poor print quality. Like HP's 6x4" Photosmart models, it prints with only three inks. We were disappointed with the grain in pictures from the Photosmart 375, but those from the P315 were worse and also showed a little banding. Each page had a region running lengthwise where it seemed ink hadn't been placed accurately. This was most obvious in our black and white test image, where it appeared as a band with coarser grain that contained slight and varied colour casts. We re-ran the P315's automatic head calibration and tried a replacement ink cartridge, but neither action could overcome the problem.

The printer smudged ink on to the back of some pages. This can sometimes happen with borderless printing, where ink is placed at the very edge of the paper, but we've not seen it before with a dedicated photo printer.

We weren't able to run our standard print tests from a PC, but printing six 6x4" photos from an xD card at the highest quality took 16 minutes 34 seconds. This is acceptable, but not particularly fast.

The P315 is well priced for a photo printer with a screen. Its running costs are also reasonable; using Lexmark's 70-page paper and ink bundle, they work out at 28.6p per page. Other than this, the size of its prints is the only area where it measures up to the competition.