Photo Printers: The Price of Great Pictures

HP Photosmart 8150, Epson Stylus Photo R320, Lexmark P915

HP Photosmart 8150

The $200 HP Photosmart 8150 has a 2.5-inch color LCD display, which makes it easy to see what you're printing when you use a digital camera's media card. Four slots protected by a clear cover on the front of the printer accommodate all the popular card formats. From the control panel you can crop an image, remove red-eye, or add a decorative border. You can also print directly from a compatible camera connected to the 8150's direct-print port, or you can plug in a USB flash drive loaded with images.

The 8150 has a large footprint but keeps its paper supply conveniently underneath and out of the way. The paper drawer holds as many as 100 sheets of plain paper, up to legal size. A secondary feeder lets you keep 20 sheets of 4-by-6-inch photo paper ready to go. For even more flexibility, you can add a 250-sheet paper drawer for $80. The printer detects the type of paper loaded in the trays. An optional duplexer (also $80) will let you save paper by printing double-sided.

Two cartridges supply up to six inks for printing. In the box, you get a tri-color (cyan, magenta, yellow) cartridge and a photo cartridge with black, light cyan, and light magenta inks. You can swap the photo cartridge for a black-ink cartridge for printing text documents; for printing black-and-white photos, you can insert a photo-gray cartridge that has two shades of gray ink in addition to black ink. Swapping cartridges often could be a pain, but at least you can store partially used cartridges in an indentation under the cover. In IPL's tests, 4-by-6-inch prints cost a pricier-than-average 74 cents each. Our test set--seven desktop photo printers and four snapshot printers--averaged 62 cents per print.

The Photosmart 8150 made very high quality photographic prints on glossy letter-sized paper. However, borderless prints made on 4-by-6-inch glossy paper didn't look as good; the prints were marred by some unusual dithering in the lightest areas and by a light band near the trailing edge. On plain paper, text looked a bit fuzzy, and the edges of closely spaced bold lettering bled together. Color graphics on plain paper looked a little washed out.

The Photosmart 8150 printed text at 5.2 ppm, which was slightly faster than the 4.6 ppm average, and it generated graphics faster than most other models, at 2.1 ppm. Glossy snapshots emerged in 102 seconds, slightly slower than the test set average of 97 seconds.

Options include a Bluetooth wireless adapter ($50) that plugs into the direct-print port, allowing you to print from a Bluetooth-equipped camera phone or PDA with a built-in camera.

It takes time to install HP's Image Zone software suite (it takes up 600MB of space on your hard drive), but the wait is worth it: The package--which also comes with the Photosmart 8450--offers more features than the software included with the other printers in this roundup, such as tools for organizing and sharing photos, creating cards, designing album pages, and the like.

Upshot: Because of its extensive features, the Photosmart 8150 makes a nice center for the amateur digital photographer, though printing costs are high.

Paul Jasper

Epson Stylus Photo R320

If you want to print images from many different sources, the $200 Epson Stylus Photo R320 should provide the versatility you need. Its media card slots accept all the major formats, and its direct-print port does more than just communicate with compatible digital cameras: you can use it to offload your photos to a whole host of devices, including Zip drives, CD and DVD writers, and USB flash drives.

The R320 proved very economical with its ink and paper. Snapshots used up 49 cents worth of consumables; among the seven full-size printers we tested, only the Canon Pixma IP4000R's prints cost less.

Using its six individual ink cartridges, the R320 printed excellent glossy photos on letter-size paper as well as superb 4-by-6-inch snapshots. However, its text prints were the worst of the bunch: letters looked gray and very fuzzy. Similarly, color graphics on plain paper were among the least impressive; images looked blurry, with banding and obvious bleeding.

The R320 printed a borderless 4-by-6-inch snapshot in 108 seconds, 11 seconds slower than the average It printed text at 2 ppm, much slower than the 4.6 ppm average.

The Stylus Photo R320 is the only printer here that comes with two LCD screens. However, almost all the other printers with an LCD offer a 2.5-inch color display. The R320's color LCD measures only 1.5 inches--too small to adequately see edits made to your images. The larger 2.5-inch monochrome LCD displays the menus. We think a single 2.5-inch color monitor would have been more useful.

Like Epson's R800, the R320 prints on coated CD and DVD discs, using a tray to feed them through. Epson provides a basic utility for designing the labels. On the downside, the R320 skimps on paper capacity--just as the R800 does. The R800 has a single 120-sheet paper feeder, and no optional paper tray or duplexer.

Also, like the three HP printers we tested, the Stylus Photo R320 works with an optional Bluetooth adapter for printing from compatible camera phones and PDAs; Epson's device costs $69.

Upshot: The Epson Stylus Photo R320 prints superb glossy photos and works well with a variety of media, but if you plan to make many prints on plain paper you should look elsewhere.

Paul Jasper

Lexmark P915

The P915 is low-priced, at $150. Like some of the more expensive models we tested, the Lexmark P915 offers media card slots and a direct-print port so you can print photos without having to turn on your PC. The card slots and a direct-print port sit behind a see-through flap that folds down from the front panel. There's also a 2.5-inch color LCD for previewing photos, viewing simple edits, and navigating the menus. When the control panel isn't in use, the monitor displays the ink levels as a series of bars.

Those bars could represent a lot of money. Even using Lexmark's high-capacity ink cartridges, the P915 turned in the highest ink costs, and when you factor in the highest paper costs of any printer we tested, it comes out to almost a dollar per 4-by-6-inch print. That's more than four times the per-print cost of the Epson PictureMate, the model we tested that had the lowest cost of consumables. Lexmark only sells its snapshot-size glossy paper in packs of 20; all the other vendors sell their 4-by-6-inch glossy paper in packs of at least 100 sheets or offer some savings by packaging multiple packs together.

One potential plus is that the P915's ink cartridges have print heads built into them, like HP's cartridges, which in theory could prevent clogged nozzles. The P915 uses two cartridges supplying six inks: a tri-color cartridge with dye-based inks and a photo ink cartridge containing pigment-based light cyan, light magenta, and black inks. Also, you can replace the photo cartridge with a pigment black-ink cartridge. Lexmark provides a snap-on plastic cover for storing partially used cartridges.

Using the optional pigment-black cartridge, the P915 clocked a text printing speed of 7.4 ppm--faster than the six other photo printers we tested. However, the 1.5 ppm color graphics speed was among the slowest, and 4-by-6-inch photos emerged slower than from any other printer in our batch except for the Epson PictureMate. The P915 took over two minutes to print our snapshot at best quality settings.

Across the board, the P915's print quality was a disappointment. Colors in photos looked muted, and fine horizontal banding was evident. The black-and-white photo was particularly unattractive: The other six photo printers we tested earned an Outstanding for their grayscale photos. The Lexmark P915 earned a Poor for its black-and-white photo, which appeared dull and very grainy. On plain paper, color graphics looked fuzzy, but with decent contrast in shadows. The same horizontal banding showed up in text documents, and some letters were so fuzzy that they appeared to cast a shadow.

Upshot: The Lexmark P915 is priced low and includes common features like media card slots and a color LCD, but they don't make up for the poor print quality and expensive consumables.

Paul Jasper