Arriving in a smart-looking box that screams 'Photo' from every side, you could be forgiven for thinking that Lexmark's new P3150 is a photo printer, pure and simple. It isn't. It's actually the latest addition to the firm's range of all-in-one units, although one that's very clearly targeting the digital photographer.

Traditionally sneered at for their perceived 'jack-of-all trades, master-of-none' approach to the breadth of jobs they can handle, all-in-ones or multi-function devices have actually come very far. The P3150 is some testament to this and can tackle printing, scanning, faxing (via software and your own modem) and copying, with a simple array of buttons on the top of the unit giving easy access to each feature.

Its footprint isn't small, although it does take up less space than the individual items of hardware that it replaces. For convenience, there's a selection of memory card slots on the front of the unit, although you'll still need to have your PC switched on to make use of these.

We'll start with the printing side, as that's where Lexmark is pushing the unit hardest. With the correct photo paper and the right cartridges, the output here is surprisingly good. It takes its time as you'd expect (a full A4 photo took just over 14 minutes to come out), but the results were fine, although investing in a separate dedicated photo printer would reap dividends if you're serious about your digital photography. For routine text output the results were hard to fault, the only caveat being that it is notably slower than many standalone office inkjets.

On the scanning side, performance was reasonable. For the casual user, the results are perfectly adequate, but the more demanding will rightly look for a little more sharpness from their scans. And as the P3150's copy function mixes in both the scanning and printing capabilities on the machine, it's perhaps unsurprising that the results here were passable but with room for improvement.

What holds the machine's functions together is Lexmark's All-In-One Center software, which throws together basic tools to help with photo manipulation, scanning and faxing. While the software gets the job done, we've come across applications that deal with these tasks a little more easily. It's not a bad piece of software, but there are other options available to you.

Still, the Lexmark P3150 has one major ace up its sleeve; its price tag. While the unit has undeniably been bettered by other, similar devices on the market, few can match it for sheer value for money.

We found it selling for around the £95 mark, and given its capabilities that's very strong value for money. It's going to make it particularly appealing for the bargain-hunting home user, and providing it's not going to be relied upon too heavily (apart from anything else, ink cartridges aren't exactly cheap), we can envisage the two getting on quite well.

This is a capable and versatile machine that scores highly on the value for money chart. There's room for improvement in terms of printing and scanning quality, certainly, but the P3150 is nonetheless a decent budget buy.