CNET editors' review
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CNET editors' rating:
stars
OK
Detailed editors' rating
- Reviewed on: 04/12/2005
- Released on: 09/15/2004
The front-panel LCD screen is large and bright, enabling you to easily see a preview of your prints and the printer status information. It also provides a graphical representation of the ink levels in the two combo cartridges--you pair either a black or photo cartridge (light CMK) with a standard CMY cartridge--and the type of cartridge in the printer.
The P915 supports a wide variety of paper, envelope, and card sizes, and the printer lives up to its borderless-printing-media claims, with output ranging from the small Hagaki format (3.9x5.8) to full 8.5x11-inch sheets. As images are printing, the Lexmark displays a countdown timer on the LCD, but the company's team must have learned information display from early Microsoft programmers because the timer fluctuates up and down on each refresh, making it an almost worthless estimate.
The included support software is simple and easy to use. When you insert a media card, a pop-up dialog asks if you would like to save the images to your computer or select images to print. Lexmark's Fast Pics image software lets you select the photos you'd like to print, the number of prints, and the output size, though you're limited to 4x6, 5x7, and 8x10-inch sizes. You can also use the Print Center utility to output various layouts of multiple prints on pages up to 8.5x11 inches; this is useful for scrapbooks, photo frame collages, and contact sheets. The driver software has a friendly voice that tells you when printing has started and stopped, but if you print a lot, you'll probably want to turn it off.From a distance, text looks OK, but closer up, you can see the results of poor control over ink droplets and printhead alignment; jaggies and ink spray are the predominant problems. Furthermore, the slow-drying ink wicks along the grain of plain paper and, as mentioned earlier, tends to smudge. Photos printed from the Lexmark P915 will smudge easily if touched within a few minutes of printing, so you will have to be sure to avoid contact with the print surface and not allow multiple prints to stack up on the paper-exit tray. On our graphics test, the driver exhibited some odd behavior, printing black text and graphics with both process black and CMY composite ink when using the standard color and black cartridges (usually, it's one or the other). As a result, these items have a slight magenta halo, not to mention the huge waste of ink. Furthermore, we saw both printhead and color banding on the coated paper. A typical text page should run you about 4.2 cents in ink costs; an 8x10 photo uses approximately 24 cents' worth of ink.
The P915's photos lack the dynamic range of other six-ink printers, producing muddy shadow areas and oddly intense flesh tones. We also spotted several pizza-wheel-type tracks from the feed mechanism running down the length of the page.
The prints may not be very good, but they come out relatively quickly. Though its photo-print speed is fairly average for its class, the P915's text-printing speed is quite zippy for a photo printer.
CNET Labs inkjet printer perfomance
Measured in pages per minute (longer bars indicate better performance)
Measured in pages per minute (longer bars indicate better performance)
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Photo speed | |
Text speed |
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