Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Lexmark - P915 Photo Printer review


The stream of new printers hitting the market shows no sign of slowing down, with all the major manufacturers keen to fill every niche, however small, with a printer of some description. Lexmark's P915 Photo printer is a well-priced, six-colour inkjet printer aimed at the home user and features an LCD screen and fast print speeds.

As befits a home printer, the P915 Photo Printer is no boring grey lump of plastic and is decked out instead in a slightly less boring pale grey and metallic blue finish. With both paper trays extended it measures 42 x 45 x 30cm, so it takes up a fair bit of desktop space.

The P915 Photo Printer comes with a 100-page feed tray and uses Accu-Feed paper handling technology to detect the media type, automatically adjusting driver settings to produce the best quality print. It prints up to a maximum resolution of 2,400 x 1,200 dpi (dots per inch) for monochrome printing and 4,800 x 1,200 when printing colour.

Considering its price it's a real surprise to find an LCD panel on the P915 Photo Printer; not only is there one, but the 2.5-inch panel is also colour. It not only previews your photos (in stand-alone mode it also shows how the finished print will look), but also walks you through how to change the print cartridges with a neat little video, so you can see how to do it while you are changing them. And it displays a timer which counts down how long your print job will take.

All the controls sit on the front fascia on either side of the LCD panel. To the left are buttons to rotate images seen in the LCD, and set the number you want to print. The power button is here as well. To the right sit the majority of the control buttons, clustered around a larger toggle button. These control all the other functions related to printing your photos; print preview, select, menu, stop/clear, resize and start. The toogle button itself has the dual functions of scrolling through your photos and selecting menu options.

At the far right-hand side of the front panel sits the card reader and PictBridge interface. The card reader reads all the commonly used flash memory cards; CompactFlash Type I & II, Memory Stick, Multi Media, Secure Digital, SmartMedia, Microdrive and xD cards.

Lexmark quotes performance figures of 22ppm (pages per minute) black and 15ppm colour for the P915 Photo Printer, but these are, as usual, just engine speeds and were borne out by our tests of engine speed. In reality it prints text at a shade under 8ppm, while this drops to 4ppm when printing a mix of text and graphics.

Text quality is good with sharp, unblurred images. It takes just over a minute to print an A4 colour print on normal paper and five minutes when printing on glossy premium paper. Colour prints show good colour separation and sharpness.

The P915 Photo Printer comes with Lexmark's own Imaging Studio software which guides you through all aspects of your print job; printing photos in common sizes, attaching images to e-mails, printing from memory cards, printing albums of varying sizes of photos and resizing photos.