Small, compact body; inexpensive; reasonable print costs; decent print quality; adjustable LCD
Slow print speeds; limited image enhancements; included desktop software is limited in range; no battery option
The Lexmark P350 snapshot photo printer is less expensive than the competition, but its slower print speeds and somewhat half-baked features make it less attractive
6.2 Good
Reviewed by Felisa Yang
Lexmark's portable P350 photo printer brings snapshot printing into the home, albeit slowly. Priced at around £100, the P350 prints 100x150mm (4x6-inch) photos at a pokey rate, but with acceptable print quality for casual snapshooters. Although they cost a little more, we prefer either the Epson PictureMate Pal or the Canon Selphy DS810, both of which offer better-thought-out features and faster print speeds.
Design
The white-and-silver P350 is small and lightweight. It measures 127 by 235 by 147mm and weighs 1.84kg. The fold-up handle makes it easy to carry, but the included power cord and adaptor put a damper on the portability. We would like to see an optional battery pack for this printer, but even the more expensive Epson PictureMate Pal and Canon Selphy DS810 don't offer a battery option.
On top of the printer is a 61mm (2.4-inch) colour LCD that's mounted on a swivel, allowing the screen to move through a range of about 90 degrees. We like this feature because it lets you optimise the viewing angle for various lighting conditions. The simple control panel features four arrow keys, a check mark button (that is, an OK button), a back button for navigating menus, a button with a palette icon for tweaking images, a one-touch red-eye-reduction button and a print button.
On the back of the printer lives the input tray, which can hold up to 25 sheets of photo paper. The printer accepts various sizes of paper, up to 100x200mm (4x8 inches) -- a somewhat unusual size. If you were to print a 100x150mm image on 100x200mm paper, you would get a white border around the image, but if you were to print a 100x200mm image from a program such as Photoshop, you could make a 100x200mm borderless print on the P350. On the front, there's an output tray, a USB port for flash storage devices or PictBridge cameras and memory card slots.
Features
You can use the Lexmark P350 as a stand-alone snapshot printer, or you can connect it to your PC. If you're setting it up in stand-alone mode, simply follow the instructions to insert the single tricolour ink tank and plug in the power cable. If you're setting it up to print from a PC, simply insert the driver CD into your PC and click through the wizard.
To start printing straight from the P350, insert a memory card into the appropriate slot or plug your camera or another flash storage device into the USB port. Using the menu, you can print all the photos on the card in one fell swoop, or all the photos taken on particular dates, or a range of photos. If you're feeling more selective, you can scroll through the photos individually to pick images, make adjustments to them, and print the whole batch when you've finished reviewing them. Finally, you can view all the photos as a slide show and choose pictures this way, though the only adjustments you can make in this case are to turn on red-eye reduction or rotate the image.
You can also print all the photos in index form, which lays out 12 images per 100x150mm sheet. This turns out to be less useful than it should be -- the photos on the index sheet are labelled with their filename, but when you scroll through the photos on the LCD, you only see the photo number. To be truly useful, the P350 should give the same set of information in both places (or better yet, both sets of information), so that you can quickly skip through to the image you're interested in, using the index as a reference, which is something the Epson PictureMate Pal and the Selphy DS810 do.
If you want to make enhancements to the photos, you have a few limited options. For example, you can manually adjust brightness, but not contrast or colour tones. You can also crop an image, turn on Auto Enhance, turn on red-eye reduction, apply colour effects such as sepia, antique brown and antique grey, rotate the image or add a frame.
The Auto Enhance feature is rather opaque -- a search through the user guide didn't clarify exactly what Auto Enhance does. We suspect it tries to improve an image, but we're not sure how. When we used Auto Enhance to adjust a few pictures that were too dark, slightly blurry or badly lit, we didn't see a noticeable improvement. If anything, in one photo, we saw that the printer had reduced some glare on people's faces, but overall, the picture was slightly less sharp than the unenhanced print.
Of the three printers discussed here, the Canon Selphy DS810 has the best range of image-optimisation choices. Aside from turning on the Canon's general 'autoenhance' feature, you can tweak contrast and hue, brighten faces, change colour saturation, and perform colour balancing. The Lexmark's frame feature is one we haven't seen before -- it simply adds one of four frame designs (in 20 colours) to the four sides of your photo. The designs are limited and fairly cheesy, so we don't see ourselves using it much.
If you want to print photos on your PC's hard drive, you can print straight from your preferred photo-editing program, or use Lexmark's Fast Pics utility, which helps you pick photos and make adjustments to them. Oddly enough, you get fewer photo tweaking options in Fast Pics than you do working straight on the P350. For example, you can reduce red-eye, crop and 'autofix' images, but you can't adjust brightness or add frames. The Epson PictureMate Pal also has limited image-enhancement options in stand-alone mode, but at least the included imaging software gives you more control over your photos.
Once you've connected the P350 to your PC, you can also transfer photos from a memory card via Fast Pics. By comparison, the Epson PictureMate Pal also lets you transfer photos in the reverse direction. Another alternative is to transfer photos from a memory card to a USB storage device, such as a flash thumbdrive -- the PictureMate Pal doesn't allow for this.
Like Epson, Lexmark sells a photo kit that includes a single three-colour ink cartridge and 100 sheets of 100x150mm photo paper. While we couldn't locate supplies online, the recommended price for consumables is £19.99 for a cartridge and 100 sheets of paper -- making the cost 20p per print. This is in line with the per-print cost for the Epson PictureMate Pal and the Canon Selphy DS810 (not counting the initial cost of the printer, of course).
Performance
The Lexmark P350 took nearly twice as long as either the Epson or Canon models to print photos. It printed borderless 100x150mm images at a rate of 0.56 pages per minute (ppm), while the PictureMate Pal managed 1.0ppm and the Canon gave us 1.11ppm.
As far as quality goes, it's in the middle of the pack. The recommended paper is neither glossy nor matte like traditional photo paper. It has a sort of flat look to it that reminds us of magazine prints or postcards -- this is neither good nor bad, just different. Still, the images had a nice sharpness, and we liked the printer's colour handling better than that of the Epson PictureMate Pal, though it suffered from some of the same graininess. Overall, the print quality should satisfy casual snapshot users.
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Edited by Matthew Elliott
Additional editing by Elizabeth Griffin
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