Hp, Epson Inkjets Under Test
The Age
Monday May 1, 1995
Phillip Bertolus reviews Hewlett-Packard's Deskjet 540 and the Epson Stylus Color model - and finds that although one is clearly superior, so is the price.
INKJET printers have come a long way since the early models I first saw 13 years ago. In those days they were expensive, had difficulty aligning the dots on the paper and were constantly in need of tuning to keep the output legible. But, they were quiet, which made them indispensable in the air-traffic-control environment where they lived.
The current generation of inkjet printers now features color and remarkably low cost.
The two inkjets I'm reviewing here are Hewlett-Packard's Deskjet 540 model and Epson's Stylus Color model. The first impression of both printers comes from the headquarters of both companies here in Australia.
Before taking delivery of the printers I asked if they would work with OS/2, my preferred operating system. Both companies responded, after checking with their technical people, by saying no drivers were available, hence Windows was the only choice for testing the printers.
Well, I've got some news for them. Both printers appeared on the menu when I popped the OS/2 Warp blue edition CD-ROM into my drive to perform a selective install. What an appalling knowledge of their own product not to mention the wider issue of poor technical support, providing me with the wrong answer instead of ``I don't know"!
Furthermore, the Epson manual specifically mentions OS/2.
After selecting the printer driver, OS/2 asked me to shutdown and restart so the driver could take effect.
The first test for both printers was to print some Kodak photo CD samples on to reflex 80 gsm copy paper. The results were breathtaking, with an image quality about that of a color picture printed in The Age.
You can now take photos with your camera, take them to a Kodak photo CD shop and have them put up to 100 of your pictures on a CD for about $60. You can print them out on one of these printers together with text from your favorite word processor. It opens up a whole new dimension in low end desktop publishing, albeit a tad on the expensive side.
Both printers use inks in the four primary colors cyan, magenta, yellow and black to produce their color images. In the Hewlett- Packard machine the inks are all in a single cartridge. The Epson Stylus Color uses two cartridges, one for black and one for the other three colors.
Epson reaons that users print text for most of the time and so use more black than any other color. When the black runs out on the HP Deskjet 540 you must replace the entire set of four colors, but on the Epson you need replace only the empty black cartidge, thus saving money.
HP has a 560 model in which each color has its own cartridge. When I compared the black print from both printers to my HP LaserJet they looked slightly grey, however, there doesn't seem to be any difference between the two Inkjets.
I found in my tests that the Epson produced the preferable image.
The HP DeskJet 540 seemed to lay on the ink too thickly, causing the paper to wrinkle slightly.
Epson uses an ink-metering system that controls the amount sprayed on the paper. It's possible to twiddle the sliders in the HP driver window to reduce the amount of ink and hence lighten off the image, but the Epson system is much easier.
Using specially coated paper with inkjet type printers helps the image quality quite a bit.
I printed two test images from the OS/2 Multimedia Viewer samples on both printers loaded with HP's Premium Inkjet Paper and Epson's Special 360 dpi (dots per inch) paper.
Epson also has separate super special 720 dpi paper. The difference was quite pronounced with the image looking brighter in both cases.
The Epson printer really showed an advantage over the HP here, producing much brighter smoother colors.
Text quality on both printers is claimed to be in the same league as that of a laser printer. I found this something of an exaggeration.
The HP LaserJet produces crisp black high-contrast, well-defined text on normal 80 gsm paper. Both inkjets on the other hand produced text which upon close examination looked slightly grey and obviously had problems with the ink bleeding as it was absorbed unevenly by the copy paper.
However, the results improved dramatically when more expensive coated papers were used.
In the case of the Epson with the super high quality 720 dpi paper it is possible, with a lot of work I'm sure, to produce near photographic quality, as their special demo print shows.
The resolution of the HP DeskJet 540 printer is 300 by 300 dpi in color mode. In text presentation mode (slow mode) it is 600 by 300 dpi. The Epson Stylus Color printer has a resolution of 360 by 360 dpi in normal mode and 720 by 720 dpi in hi-res (slow) mode.
Speed is image and mode dependant. It can be as fast as three pages per minute (when you accidentally send a job that causes page feeds with nothing printed), to a coffee-inspiring four minutes or more per page in super hi-res, lots of colors, mode.
The cost of printing with these printers isn't small. Furthermore, like mobile phone plans, you need a PhD to figure out exactly how much things cost.
Costs are in the order of five cents per page in lo-res fast mode on cheap paper, to as high as $3 per page if you print A4-sized color images at 720 dpi on super high quality coated papers.
From an operator's viewpoint the Epson seems to be complicated.
There are buttons everywhere both in the software and on the printer itself. There seem to be countless options and settings from which to choose, all of them, to my mind, making for confusion.
Getting the best possible result for a particular image obviously requires a bit of tuning and fiddling with all the controls, not to mention lots of test prints going into the bin.
I prefer the HP philosophy where the DeskJet 540 has only two buttons on the front panel. One is for power while the other ejects the paper. Nothing could be simpler.
The Epson unit does both DOS/Windows and OS/2 as well as MAC via its normal parallel and RS422 interfaces. With the Hewlett Packard, if you're a MacPerson, you'll need to order a different model of the DeskJet 540 from us IBM folks.
The Epson Stylus Color is clearly a superior beast to the Hewlett- Packard 540. But it costs more, too.
Don't count on brilliant technical support from either company. The tricky questions have to be referred to the USA or Japan.
Both companies offer quality technical support via CompuServe. I've had occasion to use online support in the case of HP's LaserJet with definitive answers coming directly from the HP Advanced Peripherals Division somewhere in CyberSpace.
Overall I preferred the Epson Stylus Color over the Hewlett-Packard DeskJet 540. It is more flexible in the range of things it can do. If you ignore all the buttons and controls everywhere and just print it does a fine job.
The Epson Stylus Color has a street price of about $825, which is close to double that of HP's DeskJet 540. It is possible to buy a 540 for as low as $465. That must be the best bang for your buck of any inkjet color printer in town even if it's not as good as the Epson.
Phillip Bertolus is the principal of Program Development Systems a Melbourne software company. Program Development Systems develops and markets MXPascal compilers, Murrumbeena Network cards and network software, and modem voice/fax/data software. He can be reached by fax on 563-7855, via CompuServe 100236,2752 or via Internet pds@iaccess.com.au.
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