Introduction
Never before have consumers been able to buy so much printer for so little money. Take a look in almost any computer or office superstore, and you'll find printers for a few hundred dollars that produce strikingly high quality text and near-photographic images. In this article, we'll take a look at the leaders in the marketplace and examine the pros and cons of each.
The Market Leaders
Hewlett Packard continues to be the market leader in ink-jet printers, but Epson is a major player as well, as are Canon and Lexmark. There a few other companies that are significant players in the printer and/or related multifunction peripheral markets, such as Xerox, Oki, and Brother, but for those who are going for image quality as a primary determiner, these are not the best bets. Most reviews focus on image fidelity, price and/or speed, but we also think reliability, software compatibility and availability of ink supplies are important issues to consider as well. Thus, we'll look at each of these issues in part 2 of this report, coming soon.
Best Bets
Of the bunch, we think the HP DeskJet 970Cse printer, described in detail here, is the standout. This printer is not only faster than its competition from Epson, Lexmark and Canon, but it has tangibly better image quality. The ink-drop dot-size (five picoliters) is exceptionally small and precise, leading to an image we think is currently unsurpassed in the consumer marketplace. The fact that the printer can, through a fancy paper-flipping mechanism, print on both sides of a sheet of paper, is another bonus. This printer raises the bar for colour inkjets. However, with a Canadian retail price of $599 (and a street price of C$500-$600 dollars), some users may be content to settle for second or third best.
We are also fond of the Epson 740 and 750 models (and, indeed, the less-expensive Epson models aren't bad, either). However, we find the Epson units a little more prone to ink-nozzle clogging and the printers a little more likely to misbehave with printer jams and paper misfeeds than the HP models we've tested. The Epson 750 rates second-highest in our image quality tests (only the HP 970Cse and the more expensive P1100 model based on the same mechanism rated higher), and the 740 is close behind. However, we'd still rate the Epson 740 as very good overall and recommend it as a solid choice in USB/parallel printers. The 740 (and the iMac-flavoured 740i) are the best bets in the C$200 - $300 range.
In the bargain basement, you have to be willing to make some compromises. The printer you choose is either going to be slower, noisier, or suffer one of the limitations that put the Lexmark Z11 on our cautionary list. This unit has only one ink-cartridge holder. Thus, if you want to print in color, you must pull out the black ink cartridge. When printing color, it "fakes" blacks by overprinting the other inks, wasting ink and producing muddier blacks than we'd like. However, the image quality of photos is excellent, and, when the black cartridge is in place, text is crisper than you might expect in a printer costing not much more than $100.Generally, though, we recommend avoiding single-cartridge printers. Considering that your printer will probably outlast your computer in long-term viability, this seems like a poor place to make such as a severe compromise.
Another low-cost printer with attractive features is the Canon BJC5100. This unit's standout feature is its support for tabloid-size paper, albeit hand-fed one 11"x17" sheet at a time. It also includes innovative ink cartridge flexibility, allowing two black cartridges to be "doubled up," so that each cartridge only has to print one half of the page. With this technique, the printer can achieve text speeds on stack-fed letter or legal size paper as high as 10 pages per minute. The unit, which is equipped with a parallel port only, unfortunately does not provide the ultra-high print quality of the other units mentioned here. But it's not bad, either -- and at a Canadian price of about $220, it's a bargain for those who need tabloid or full-bleed letter- or legal-size printing.
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