|
34 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Value for money, plain and simple, 23 Jul 2005
For me there is no question that buying your own printer is more expensive than sending your pictures off to be printed. Photobox.co.uk is where I get all MY prints done, and their prices and above all, PRINT QUALITY exceed any consumer technology available at the moment (or in the foreseeable future).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.
|
