Lexmark P450 review

There are plenty of dedicated 6x4" photo printers on the market, and jostling between manufacturers has driven the price of entry-level models below £80.

With such competition it's hard to make a printer stand out, but the CD writer fitted to Lexmark's P450 is unique.

The P450 is designed to make it easy to print photos from cameras and a range of digital storage. It has memory card slots for the common formats, and a PictBridge USB port that also recognises USB flash storage. An optional Bluetooth adaptor lets you print directly from camera phones or PDAs.

Insert a CD into the P450's drive, and you can print photos directly from it. However, insert a writable disc, and you can back up pictures on it from a memory card. The printer's CD drive sensibly creates multi-session discs, allowing you to make repeated backups of small-capacity cards without needing a new CD-R each time.

The printer's menu provides several basic editing options, allowing you to crop, resize or remove red-eye from an image without needing a computer. Unfortunately, the P450 has no standard USB interface, so it's impossible to connect a PC. Lexmark says this helps to make the printer easy to use, but it's a strange omission that greatly reduces its appeal.

As with most compact photo inkjets, the P450 prints with three inks. It's easy to insert the single cartridge; should you want to align the printer's heads, the routine is automatic and surprisingly fast. With no PC connection there's no driver to install, so you can start printing immediately. However, this only hastened our disappointment with the P450's mediocre print quality. Even at the highest setting, prints had prominent grain and colour noise that could clearly be seen from a normal viewing distance. Outlines seemed soft, and some white areas seemed to have a green bias.

The pricing of Lexmark's 140-print ink and paper bundle gives the P450 class-leading running costs of just 19.9p per print. Its ability to create archives of entire memory cards would make it ideal for digital camera users with no PC, if it only produced better photos. For computer owners, HP's Photosmart 8250 is a far better buy. Anyone else could get similarly priced digital prints from a high street lab.