Ten... inkjet photo printers
Making pictures
Product Round-up There’s only really one choice of technology for printing photos well and economically. Inkjet printers produce better quality photos than traditional silver halide, one of the reasons digital photography has superseded it.
Most of the major printer manufacturers produce inkjet printers and even the most basic of these can print good photos. When you’re buying a new printer, though, you usually want it to be able to print plain paper pages, too. These ten printers can do both and most can handle copying and scanning. There’s something to suit all budgets, with top of class performance from most.
Brother DCP-J125
All Brother’s SOHO machines look similar; neat and with a small footprint, more like an old fax machine than a modern all-in-one. This entry-level photo inkjet still includes memory card slots and a colour LCD, though not the wide-screen display which is a hallmark of Brother’s dearer models. It prints photos slowly, taking around three minutes for a 15 x 10cm print, under test. Print quality is fair on lighter shades, with natural colour rendition but, as with many inexpensive inkjets, dark hues can be murky and merge into each other. There’s a third off the RRP, if you shop around.
Canon Pixma MG8150
This is a high-end photographic all-in-one from Canon’s extensive range and includes several extras a photographer will value. As well as photo card slots, which include CompactFlash for older, pro DSLRs, there’s a transparency adapter in the lid for scanning conventional slides and negatives. Twin paper sources also mean you can load plain and photo paper simultaneously. A 15 x 10cm print comes through in around 35s and extra photo black and grey inks improve colour and black and white images, giving some of the best photos seen from a non-professional printer. Online discounts put this machine at around £220.
Next page: Canon Pixma iP4950
COMMENTS
Rubbish Reviews
How long does a set of ink cartridges last in a turned off printer?
How much does a replacement set of print cartridges cost?
The major failing with the last 3 ink-jet printers I have owned (Cannon, HP and Kodak) has been that if you leave them untouched for 3 months then come back to print something the ink has dried all over the heads and you need to buy new.
Often a new printer is cheaper than a set of ink-cartridges.
Now I send them off to snapfish or take them to the local print-shop, it's cheaper and gets better results.
cost per print?
Your analysis is all well and good, but you give no indication of the total cost of ownership. (Ie cost of replacment ink), and consequent cost per page of printing.
Given that for example HP seem to follow a 'loss leader' approach with their printer pricing, to lock you into buying their expensive ink refills, the price of the printer is a small proportion of the cost over the life of the device.
Why not get someone who knows what they are talking about?
"Inkjet printers produce better quality photos than traditional silver halide" There was really no point in reading any more of the article if the writer has such a poor understanding of image quality that they seriously believe that statement.
Inkjet printing has many advantages over optical printing but quality isn't among them.
I bought an inkjet a while back and while it's pretty good quality, I mostly use it for printing out boarding passes and not much else. Consequently the ink runs out and costs a fortune to replace (it's a Canon).
If you want to print out photos, the best thing to do is to take your photos to a photo developers (remember those?) and they'll do a high quality print-out for not much cost.
Of course, if you print out all of your photos then this probably isn't so cost-effective, but if you print out one or two every now and again like I do then this is the way to go.
Get a cheap printer with cheap ink for those boarding passes.
Most importantly
Which one DOESN'T come with 100mb plus of bloated "drivers" that asks to download updates from the Internet every 5 mins?
