Lexmark p315 review

Being last to the party can sometimes pay off: you can steal all the best ideas from everyone else and then blow them out of the water.

You can also learn from your competitors' mistakes and not repeat them. Yet here we have the Lexmark P315, which breaks all the rules of late arrival.

We really wanted to like this printer. At £99, it's not expensive, and in a couple of months when there are plenty in the shops and prices drop, it will be nothing short of cheap. It also has a colour LCD screen for previewing your photos before printing them out on 6 x 4in paper. The cartridge and the paper are bundled, just like they are with Epson's PictureMate, and setup is a breeze; a real no-brainer for even the greenest user.

However, you can't connect it to your Mac, or any kind of computer, come to that. This is a purely standalone device, with slots for memory cards, and room at the front to plug in a PictBridge camera. We tested it using 2, 4 and 5 megapixel shots, and achieved remarkably consistent output times. The fastest was a 2 megapixel photo on a Memory Stick, which completed in two minutes 30 seconds; the slowest, a 5 megapixel shot on an xD card that took two minutes 51 seconds. They're not record-breaking speeds, but when you can stack up to 25 sheets in the feeder, you can at least leave it unsupervised while it gets on with the job.

The results, though, are nothing to rush back for. The pictures we fed the P315 were shot using Sony, Canon and Olympus cameras, and in all cases the results were characterised by a coarse grain, occasional banding and, on some pictures, a strange rainbow effect we can only put down to poor halftoning.

While the overall tone of the images was generally good, there was little comparison to results we obtained from the Epson PictureMate and HP Photosmart 375 devices, both of which offer a similar service, but have more features for not much more money. This graininess meant edges were indistinct and people's faces were unclear. The pictures also remained a little tacky even the day after printing, so they could attract dust over time.

This is a real shame, as Lexmark fared particularly well in our inkjet printers Labs in this issue (see p38), and we can only assume that the difference is down to the fact the P915 it submitted for that test uses six inks, while the P315, a dedicated photo printer, uses only three. We found it somewhat ironic that the paper for the P315 is 'optimised for Lexmark's newest six-colour printers'.

In short, this mini printer promised much but delivered little. After handing its photos around the MacUser team, the overall feeling was one of disappointment. The results weren't the kind of thing we would be happy to send to a relative, and we certainly wouldn't frame them for hanging.

The best online price we could find for the PictureMate was £109.85 at PC World, including tax and delivery. For the Lexmark P315, it was £95.80 from Pixmania. In saving £15, though, you're gaining a better screen, but losing the option to use a battery when you're on the move or add Bluetooth for wireless connections, ruling out any hope of printing from your Mac, halving the number of inks from six to three and downgrading the quality of your output. If that sounds like a fair compromise, ignore our rating.