Lexmark P315 Portable Photo Printer - 10x15cm prints - LCD Screen - Card reader

There are however people who prefer to go down the route of buying their own printer. My father is one of them. Being computer illiterate he cannot bother to 'upload' pictures onto servers and fill out forms, and being unimpressed by a number of high street dealers (Boots, BonusPrint etc) in terms of the print quality and cost he decided to just buy a printer and do it on his own.

So come Father's Day I pay £60 for this printer, because it is all I could afford and having read a favourable review in a photo mag I figured what could go wrong. Yes, Canon and HP's printers will be better, but you are paying for it. Do not expect this to compete with the Picturemate or Selphy models. They cost double, and their ink cartridges will set you back a bundle.

I just printed 15 pictures today and am very impressed. Colours are vibrant and the detail is crisp. Coming from a Canon Powershot A80 (4MP) camera the prints are satisfying. Yes there are flaws. Grain is evident in places (although not in the original pictures), and there is not a smooth consistency (as in, if there are dark and light colours next to one another it can be quite challenging for the £60 technology) that we are used to with our film prints.

But my dad is happy, and that is what matters the most. So many people get bogged down in the specs that they forget to get on with life! Yes, take a magnifying glass to anything the Lexmark prints and you will find flaw after flaw, but then you are being completely unreasonable when you consider that once upon a time, not too long ago, that print quality like this would have cost up to ten times as much.

There are flaws: it reads my CF cards a bit slow, the menus are not as effectice as they should be, and it cannot be hooked up to your PC, so if you delete your pictures on your memory cards to free up space but in six months time want to print out another batch for some friends/family, then you're gonna have to put them back onto your card (archive them on your PC/MAC) and then do it all over again (pain in the back side if you ask me). You are also restricted to 4 by 6 cm prints, and for those who know, paying the extra pennies for 5 by 7s is really worth it. But this is a restriction with all of these types of printers

So there it is, a cheap and cheerful product from Lexmark (who's reputation is a lot to be desired), but I consider myself to be quite demanding when it comes to quality and really cannot recommend this highly enough for those who are on a budget and couldn't care less about a fraction of less quality when they are saving literally hundreds of pounds. Enjoy.

This P315 seemed like a good option as it is so much cheaper than its competition.

I didn't expect to get such a great little printer for such a low cost.

The quality is great, and you can get loads of prints from only 1 cartridge! Unlike other printers, which my friends have, where you have to use lots of cartridges for each colour, this Lexmark P315 only uses 1 ink cartridge! No messy inky fingers changing over cartridges!!!

My recommendation: GO AND GET A P315 - THEY'RE GREAT !!!

Insofar as the printer goes, it has been easy to set up, easy to understand the instructions and the pictures print out as well as any photograph you would have to pay to be printed. Really good little machine.

Regarding the price I saw this printer originally for £59.99 in PC World but by the time I went to get one they had sold out (not surprising really), then their price went up to £79.99, in Comet they are £99.99 and on line at DABS they are also £99.99, so the Amazon price is brilliant. Well worth the money.