Lexmark P450 review

If you want instant prints of your digital photos, it can be quite a hassle having to hook your printer up to a PC and go through the rigmarole of installing drivers and so on.

That's why, in the past year, all of the major printer manufacturers have brought out portable photo printers that can print snaps without the help of a computer. The P450 is the latest portable photo printer from Lexmark.

It reads image files from a wide range of memory cards, including xD cards, which lots of card readers don't support. The Lexmark P450 also has a Pictbridge USB port. You can't use this to connect to a PC - this printer can't connect to a PC at all - you use it instead to connect to a Pictbridge compatible camera. Cameras that conform to the Pictbridge standard have menu controls built in that allow you to perform basic editing functions on your images and print them when you're done. Pictbridge isn't unique to any particular company, so lots of different cameras support it.

If you want to print directly from mobile phones and handheld PCs you must also buy an extra Bluetooth adapter to plug in to the P450. Even more impressively, the Lexmark has a built-in CD writer. This means that it can print photos from CD, and also write photos from your camera's memory card to CD.

Like most compact photo inkjets, the P450 prints with three inks. It's easy to insert the single cartridge. With no PC connection, there's no driver to install, so you can start printing immediately.

Unfortunately, print quality wasn't very impressive. Even at the best quality settings, prints looked grainy, details weren't picked out precisely and areas of white sometimes had a slightly green colour cast.

The P450 is well designed, has lots of good features and, at only 20p per photo print, it's cheap to run. It's just a shame the photo quality isn't better