The sticker price on the Lexmark P707 Photo Jetprinter ($100 street) immediately makes you wonder whether you can really get true photo-quality output—or something close to it—from a printer that costs so little. The answer is yes, but you'll have to wait for it. In fact, you can watch almost a full episode of your favorite TV sitcom in the roughly 25 minutes an 8- by 10-inch photo takes to print at best quality.

The P707 is dressed in industrial-design tones of dark grays and black, surprisingly compact, and, at 4.5 pounds, light. Four memory-card slots on the right-hand side simplify the transfer of photos to your computer from most memory cards, including Type I and II CompactFlash, IBM Microdrives, MultiMediaCards, Secure Digital, SmartMedia, and Sony Memory Sticks. Note, however, that you cannot print from a memory card without connecting to a computer.

The unit, which ships as a six-color printer, comes with a tricolor cartridge and a photo ink cartridge that includes black, light cyan, and light magenta, but you can also use the P707 as a four-color printer by replacing the photo ink cartridge with a black cartridge. We tested both ways.

Setup involves little more than plugging in the cables, inserting the ink cartridges, and installing the software. You can switch between black and photo ink cartridges as often as you like. The photo ink cartridge comes with a holder that protects whichever cartridge is not currently in the printer.

The P707 managed a respectable 3.9 pages per minute (ppm) for text, printing a 10-page Microsoft Word file in 2 minutes 33 seconds in default mode. With photos, however, the printer slows to a crawl. Using four ink colors on plain paper, printing our 8- by 10-inch sample photo took 2 minutes 55 seconds in default mode and 7 minutes 45 seconds in best mode. On photo paper in best mode, an 8-by-10 took 25 minutes 8 seconds. Using 6 ink colors takes a bit longer. Surprisingly, however, photos look better using four colors. The six-color output suffers from flaws like posterization, so there's no reason to use the photo ink cartridge.

Output quality using four inks is good to excellent overall, which helps make up for the slow speed. Photos approach true photo quality and text in best mode is easily readable in 5-point type with most of the fonts we tested—even at 4 points with some fonts. If you can live with the slow performance, you should be happy with the output quality—especially at this price.