Inkjet printers - Join the jet set

With digital photography, the Internet, multimedia and graphic designor as little as £99. We put 16 models to the test. applications now at the fingertips of even novice PC users, it's no surprise that the next item on many technology shopping lists is a colour printer.

Although it is possible to spend several hundred pounds on a sophisticated colour thermal printer, and have your glossy full-page prints looking fantastic, they'll also cost a fortune and you won't be able to print text. So for most purposes a colour inkjet printer is the best option, and a good one will handle everything from printing reports with a dash of colour to doing justice to images captured with a digital camera.

If you're used to using a laser printer, the more leisurely approach employed by inkjets might seem a little tedious. Some manufacturers are attempting to make the process a bit quicker though, and if you're prepared to compromise a little on quality, the fastest models can output over two colour pages per minute on plain paper. This is a far brighter picture than when we looked at inkjet printers last December, where some models couldn't even output two pages of text per minute.

A cut in printing speed isn't the only thing you'll have to take into account if you choose the inkjet route. Colour printing is costly, both in terms of ink and paper. So before you buy a colour inkjet, always consider the price of these items too, to gain a better idea of how much the printer will cost you in the long run.

We've looked at 16 printers here, with prices ranging from just £99 to over £450. Manufacturers make bold claims for their models, from faster print speeds to better printing but as you'll see, some models are markedly better than others.

What is inkjet printing?

If you think about it, inkjet printers use one of the most traditional printing methods around, since, essentially, they're just putting liquid ink onto paper.

This month's How IT Works (page130) explains how an inkjet printer does its job in more detail, but it's worth pointing out that there are two different takes on the technology. The first type is a thermal process and it was invented by both Canon and Hewlett-Packard separately. Canon calls it bubblejet printing; HP (and everyone else that uses it) calls it inkjet printing, but the concept is otherwise the same.

Epson's Stylus printers use a mechanical process called micro piezo printing.

The result - ink on paper - is the same but Epson is the only printer manufacturer to do it this way.

Two cartridges or not?

For the most part, inkjet printers use two separate ink cartridges for regular printing. One holds black ink and one holds cyan, magenta and yellow inks. Put them all together and you have a CMYK (K is black) printer and any colour can be produced using a mix of just these four.

CMYK printing isn't always perfect though, and the Epson Stylus Photo 1200 and Canon BJC-6000 add two lighter shades of cyan and magenta to the colour cartridge for more realistic output, particularly with tricky colours like flesh tones.

Another advantage offered by the BJC-6000 is its separate ink tanks for each colour. You can replace each one as it runs out - handy if you do a lot of cyan printing, for example. With other printers, once a single colour is depleted, the whole colour cartridge must be replaced, regardless of how much of the other colours are left.

On the downside, when you're using it in six-colour mode for graphics, the BJC-6000 uses a small black cartridge and this won't last long if it's used for text printing. Thankfully, the printer can also use just one double-size black cartridge for all-mono printing or a larger black tank with the standard three-colour combination for less demanding colour prints.

The one glaring exception to the two-cartridge rule is Lexmark's budget Color JetPrinter 1100. This is an old-fashioned one-cartridge printer - either black (K) or CMY. There are problems with this system. Firstly, it's a pain to have to change over cartridges every time you want to print in colour; secondly, the composite black made up from three colours is washed out and slightly greenish in tone, and thirdly, it's a mammoth waste of ink if you forget to put the black cartridge back for black text printing. However, in its defence, the JetPrinter 1100 is only £99.

Pricey printing

The cost of colour printing involves more than just the price of a printer.

You also need ink and paper, and the cost of these 'consumables' can soon mount up.

The table at the end of this article shows the prices you'll have to pay to print out an A4 colour page on glossy paper for each printer (inkjet printers need special paper to produce their best colour output). Prices rise from an estimated 33p per page for the HP DeskJet 880C, 895Cxi and 1120C, to a whopping £1.24 a page with the Xerox XJ8C.

Note that these estimates are calculated using manufacturers' own claims about the average capacity of an ink cartridge, based on anything from 5 percent to 15 percent coverage, per colour, per page. This is a tad optimistic, as many colour graphics and photos can cover a whole page, so our estimates may be a bit low.

A little research may save you cash too because, while manufacturers encourage you to use their own-brand consumables, one of the printers we saw was a re-badged model from another company and could use its cheaper inks and paper. The Xerox XJ8C is actually made by Lexmark and is identical to the Color JetPrinter 5700. Apart from using cheaper consumables, the JetPrinter is £54 cheaper than the XJ8C and performs just as well.

It's the dpi

Traditionally, manufacturers have used resolution to give you an idea of a printer's performance but things aren't quite so simple these days.

Resolution is measured in dots per inch - or dpi - and this tells you how many drops of ink a printer can place in a one-inch square.

Resolution is a factor when it comes to a technique known as half-toning.

Half-toning allows a printer to reproduce a photograph containing thousands of different shades using just four colours of ink. It works by varying the intensity and placement of the dots of ink on the page, so that the eye is fooled into seeing a smooth, evenly graduated shade. The higher a printer's resolution, the smaller the dots can be and so the better the half-toning.

As well as varying the size of the ink drops they dispense, most inkjets can now also place them so that they overlap on the page, resulting in much better prints than resolution alone might suggest. This helps to explain why the Epson Stylus Color 440 with its maximum resolution of 720x360dpi can still print better graphics than the Lexmark Colour Jetprinter 3200, which has a top resolution of 1200dpi.

Other innovations that help to improve print quality are the extra shades of ink introduced by Epson's Stylus Photo 1200 and Canon's BJC-6000 - both offer six-colour printing instead of the usual four. The extra edge is particularly evident in the top-quality images produced by the Stylus Photo 1200, which is specifically designed to produce true photographic-quality output.

One interesting fact is that if you opt for Canon's BJC-6000, you can only achieve a maximum resolution of 720dpi using the six-colour photo cartridge. If you want to achieve the highest resolution of 1440dpi, you'll have to stick with the standard colour cartridge. So if you need the highest resolution twinned with the benefits of six-colour printing, the Epson Stylus Photo 1200 is your best bet.

Speed is not the essence

Colour printing is really for the patient, since even the fastest printer - the Epson Stylus Colour 440 - took nearly five minutes to output an A4 colour photograph on special paper at its maximum resolution. The slowest printer - the Lexmark 1100 - took closer to 20 minutes.

You also have to take into account ink drying times. Canon, for example, recommends that you leave prints to dry for two minutes on glossy paper, or 10 minutes if you're using high-gloss photo film.

Of course, you can speed up printing by dropping the print resolution and when we printed out the same A4 photograph on plain paper at 300dpi, printing times decreased accordingly. The Epson 440 managed a page in two minutes, while its big brother the 900 managed just over two pages a minute. But if you lower resolution, quality will suffer and so for the best results, you'd be better off leaving your printer to it while you make yourself a cup of tea.

Software

All these printers grant you, via your PC, access to software controls to adjust printer settings and keep an eye on your print jobs. These are intuitive and easy to use, providing you with a graphical picture of how to manage your printer. You can use them to tell how your ink supplies are doing, to automate routine maintenance like cleaning the printheads, or to help you access the ink cartridges when you need to change them.

Another useful feature is the ability to adjust your printer for the optimum results for each print job. For example, you can choose the quality of the final print out from 'draft' to 'best' and tell your printer what kind of print job you are doing, such as a colour graphic on plain paper, a photograph on glossy paper, or just text.

Extras

Most of the printers offer a similar range of features but three stand head and shoulders above the rest in one respect - paper size. The Canon BJC-4650, Epson Stylus Photo 1200 and HP 1120C can all handle paper up to A3 in size - useful, if you want to print large posters or full A4 pages with no white borders.

Another feature offered by some of the printers is a USB port. All of the Epson printers apart from the 440 have USB, so you can just plug and play with either a Windows 98 PC, Apple iMac or G3 PowerMac. The HP DeskJet 880C and 895Cxi have USB ports too but they only support Windows 98 out of the box. Hewlett-Packard does offer an optional cable kit to connect them up to an iMac though.

Whether your PC comes with a USB port or not, you'll still have to buy your own cable to connect a printer to it, since none of these printers come with one in the box. A USB or parallel printer cable should cost around £5 to £10.

RESOLUTION

Put in simple terms, resolution is a broad indication of the quality of output an inkjet printer can achieve and it's measured in dots per inch, or dpi. For example, the Epson Stylus Color 900 has a resolution of 1440x1440dpi, so it can fill a one-inch square with 2,073,600 individual dots of ink. Some of the printers allow you to vary the print resolution - useful, since the higher the resolution, the longer an image takes to print.

Here we have the same image printed at three different resolutions.

You can see the dots that make the image printed at 360dpi by the Epson Stylus Color 440 (right, top).

When the resolution is increased to 720dpi on the same printer (right, middle), the dots are smaller and so the picture is much smoother.

The Epson Stylus Photo 1200 offers the highest resolution of all - 1440dpi (right, bottom). Its images are very smooth and it's much harder to make out the dots that make up the image.

PAPERCHASE

The paper you use in an inkjet printer will affect its output and if all you want to do is print out text and simple colour graphics, you can stick with cheap photocopier paper. Most of the printers produced reasonable-quality text on plain paper, but at smaller font sizes there was some blurring as ink soaked into the paper. Graphics are another matter and when, for example, you print a black border around a coloured box, the black ink can bleed into the coloured area, leaving you with spidery outlines.

On plain paper, the Canon BJC-2000 (above left) can't handle a mix of black and coloured inks and gives seriously patchy edges. The same problem can be seen with the Canon BJC-4650 (above right).

If you want top-quality photographic images, you need glossy coated paper for the best results. Hewlett-Packard, Lexmark and Xerox use rather flimsy glossy sheets that aren't very robust, but they still provide vivid results. Canon and Epson use thicker glossy paper that's around the same weight as that used for a regular photograph.

Special paper costs vary from around 27p per sheet from Hewlett-Packard, to £1.12 from Xerox (for the same-quality paper) but whichever end of the scale you choose, glossy paper isn't cheap and should be reserved for when you really need that extra-special print.

The Epson Stylus Color 900 is a superb printer but it still benefits from glossy paper. The print on plain paper (above left) is clear and sharp but the one on glossy paper (above right) is brighter, with richer colours and greater definition.

Unfortunately, not even the best paper can help some printers and the HP DeskJet 695C (left) produced dark grainy results even on glossy paper costing 27p a sheet.

BEST BUY

Once again, Epson is our choice for the best colour inkjet printer. You can't really go wrong with any of the Epson models that we've looked at in this group test, but we think that the Stylus Color 900 is the best of the lot.

It's true that this printer is a bit pricier than many of the other models under consideration here but if you can afford it, you won't be disappointed. Graphics are sharp and vivid on both plain and special paper, and it handles tricky flesh tones with aplomb.

Text printing isn't bad either and, if this isn't enough, it's also one of the fastest printers in the test and won't leave you waiting for top-quality results. A real winner.

If none of the Epson range tempt you, we'd suggest HP's DeskJet 895Cxi as your next choice. It's quite a bit cheaper than the Stylus Color 900, produces clear results for both text and graphics, and its rendering of solid areas of black was unsurpassed. It's no slouch in the pages-per-minute stakes and it's one of the cheapest printers to run.

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