The brook of new printers hitting the market shows no sign of slowing down, with all the major manufacturers eager to fill every place, however small, with a printer of some explanation. Lexmark’s P915 Photo printer is a well-priced, six-color 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 dull grey lump of plastic and is decked out instead in a somewhat less boring pale grey and tinny blue finish. With both paper trays comprehensive 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 notice the media type, mechanically adjusting driver settings to make the best superiority print. It prints up to a maximum resolution of 2,400 x 1,200 dpi (dots per inch) for neutral printing and 4,800 x 1,200 when printing color.

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 color. 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 alter the print cartridges with a tidy little video, so you can see how to do it while you are altering them. And it displays a timer which counts down how long your print job will take.

All the controls sit on the front on either side of the LCD panel. To the left are buttons to rotate images seen in the LCD, and set the number you wanted to print? The power button is here as well. To the right sit the bulk of the control buttons, clustered around a larger toggle button. These control all the other functions related to printing your photos; print preview, choose, menu, stop/clear, resize and start. The tootle 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 normally used flash memory cards; CompactFlash Type I & II, Memory Stick, Multi Media, Secure Digital, Smart Media, Micro drive and xD cards.

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

Text superiority is good with sharp, unburned 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. Color prints show good color division 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 unreliable sizes of photos and resizing photos.

Lexmark’s color desktop printer, the Z1320, is now accessible in India. This compact inkjet printer is mainly planned for home use.

The printer offers print resolutions of up to 1200 x 1200 pixels (Black) and 4800 x 1200 pixels (color). It promises print speeds of up to 22ppm Black and 16ppm color. The printer comes with an optional six-color printing feature, and claims to be capable of creating color photos and professional-quality text and graphics, as well as borderless prints up to 5-inches x 7-inches. It can print on transparencies, envelopes, and photo paper.

The Z1320 comes with high-yield Black and color cartridge, and has an option for additional higher capacity ink cartridge as well, which offers users best cost-per-page among printers of its class, says the company.

The printer’s package includes “Lexmark Software Suite” which includes the “Lexmark Imaging Studio” software to edit images. Through this, users can crop, rotate, and resize photos, manage colors on the photo, and enable red eye reduction as well.

Supporting Microsoft Windows 2000, XP, XP Professional x64, and Apple Mac operating systems, Lexmark Z1320 promises a duty cycle of 3000 pages per month, and comes with a one-year limited exchange warranty. The Z1320 will be available with Cyberstar Infocom at a price of Rs 2,900 from March 2008 .

Lexmark’s color desktop printer, the Z1320, is now accessible in India. This compact inkjet printer is mainly planned for home use.

The printer offers print resolutions of up to 1200 x 1200 pixels (Black) and 4800 x 1200 pixels (color). It promises print speeds of up to 22ppm Black and 16ppm color. The printer comes with an optional six-color printing feature, and claims to be capable of creating color photos and professional-quality text and graphics, as well as borderless prints up to 5-inches x 7-inches. It can print on transparencies, envelopes, and photo paper.

The Z1320 comes with high-yield Black and color cartridge, and has an option for additional higher capacity ink cartridge as well, which offers users best cost-per-page among printers of its class, says the company.

The printer’s package includes “Lexmark Software Suite” which includes the “Lexmark Imaging Studio” software to edit images. Through this, users can crop, rotate, and resize photos, manage colors on the photo, and enable red eye reduction as well.

Supporting Microsoft Windows 2000, XP, XP Professional x64, and Apple Mac operating systems, Lexmark Z1320 promises a duty cycle of 3000 pages per month, and comes with a one-year limited exchange warranty. The Z1320 will be available with Cyberstar Infocom at a price of Rs 2,900 from March 2008 .

Lexmark - X5250 All-in-One it would come into view that Lexmark wants to control the printer market in terms of pure number of diverse products. The company is pumping out an apparently never-ending stream of new products; one of the latest is yet another addition to the All in One product line; the X5250. A accepted choice where space is limited in either the office or home, such multi-function devices are an important part of the printer market, and with the X5250 Lexmark has joint the common features with a good price.

Finished in the well-known Lexmark grey, black and silver, the X5250 offers a claimed 20ppm (pages per minute) for neutral and 14ppm for color printing, but remember that these figures are just engine speeds; when it comes to printing real text or images the page count is often dramatically reduced. This is the case with just about all printers.

Copy speed is quoted at 15 monochrome or 9 color copies per minute, the same speed, incidentally, as the X5250’s larger sibling, the X5270. But once again, real life speeds will be slower. In our tests, five high quality, A4, mono copies took a shade under three minutes to copy, while an A4 magazine cover took around two minutes.

Scanning resolution is a handy 600 x 2,400 dpi and it scans at 48-bit color. Connection is via a USB 2.0 port and, as with so many USB devices these days, the cable isn’t provided.

As standard the X5250 is a four-cooler printer, but changing the regular tri-colour cartridge for the photo cartridge (not included) adds two more colours; light cyan and light magenta. The cartridges that come with the printer have a predictable life of 200 pages for the black cartridge and 190 for the standard tri-colour one. Higher capacity cartridges are obtainable.

Although it doesn’t have the memory card slots of a true photo printer, the X5250 does offer borderless prints and that photo cartridge option. Colour prints with the normal cartridge appear a little washed out, while swapping to the photo cartridge produces prints on the opposite extreme, with highly saturated colours. But as forever with colour prints it’s up to personal taste. There are no such problems with mono printing; text appears sharp and well defined.

Fitting the ink cartridges is a matter of lifting open the printer (there’s a plastic prop to keep it open) and break them into place. There’s no need for the usual ‘which pattern is best’ fiddling for head arrangement as the printer automatically aligns the head and prints out a test pattern. It also tells you to switch to plain paper, if you have more luxurious coated paper loaded, before it will print out the test pattern.

The X5250 doesn’t need to be linked to a PC to work in the copy mode, with all functions carried out by buttons on the control panel and the LCD display. The control panel consists of eight buttons; Power, Colour copy, Mono copy, Cancel, Scan, Menu display and plus and minus buttons for scrolling through the LCD menu sections.

One features

Lexmark’s X5250 is a useful all rounder, probably better suited to producing mono prints than colour. That said, if you are looking for an All in One, the X5250 offers good value for money for home or small office use.

The brook of new printers hitting the market shows no sign of slowing down, with all the major manufacturers eager to fill every place, however small, with a printer of some explanation. Lexmark’s P915 Photo printer is a well-priced, six-color 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 dull grey lump of plastic and is decked out instead in a somewhat less boring pale grey and tinny blue finish. With both paper trays comprehensive 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 notice the media type, mechanically adjusting driver settings to make the best superiority print. It prints up to a maximum resolution of 2,400 x 1,200 dpi (dots per inch) for neutral printing and 4,800 x 1,200 when printing color.

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 color. 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 alter the print cartridges with a tidy little video, so you can see how to do it while you are altering them. And it displays a timer which counts down how long your print job will take.

All the controls sit on the front on either side of the LCD panel. To the left are buttons to rotate images seen in the LCD, and set the number you wanted to print? The power button is here as well. To the right sit the bulk of the control buttons, clustered around a larger toggle button. These control all the other functions related to printing your photos; print preview, choose, menu, stop/clear, resize and start. The tootle 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 normally used flash memory cards; CompactFlash Type I & II, Memory Stick, Multi Media, Secure Digital, Smart Media, Micro drive and xD cards.

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

Text superiority is good with sharp, unburned 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. Color prints show good color division 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 unreliable sizes of photos and resizing photos.