The Lexmark P707 Photo Jetprinter ($100 street) can be summed up in one sentence: It prints photos at near true photo quality, but it takes a long time to print them. Alas, getting excellent photos may not be enough to justify the slow speed.

As a nice touch, the printer offers four memory card slots on the right side that take most formats—CompactFlash (and IBM Microdrive), Secure Digital, Memory Stick, MultiMediaCard, and SmartMedia cards. But the memory slots aren't there for direct printing. They are strictly a convenience to let you transfer photos to your computer.

Setting up the P707 is simple: Plug in the cables, insert the ink cartridges, and install the software. The unit ships with a tricolor cartridge and a photo ink tank that includes black, light cyan, and light magenta. You're better off skipping the six-color mode and buying a black ink tank to replace the photo cartridge, however. For our official timing of printing speed on glossy paper we used six colors, since that's what the printer ships with. But additional informal tests showed that printing with four colors instead of six produces better looking output in less time.

Printing with six colors gives you punchier colors than printing with four, but we'd argue that the colors are too punchy. We also saw obvious posterization on some images, which reduced the quality level significantly. Printing with four colors yielded photos at near true photo quality; graphics with suitably saturated colors; and text that was easily readable down to 5 points or smaller in most fonts we tested with.

As was already mentioned, the P707's performance left us wanting more from the printer. It made us wait substantially longer than the also slow Epson Stylus Photo 900 on five out of nine tests. Alas, it's hard to recommend the P707 unless you can find it for less than the current street price. The Canon i455 is $20 less and offers far better performance. The higher price for the P707 buys the built-in memory card reader, but we'd rather buy a separate card reader and get our photos out of the printer faster.