Printers To Dye For
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday December 12, 1998
Colour printers for less than $200 with a photo-quality finish? Yes, please.
PURCHASE costs are down, print quality is up. So printers selling for less than $200 are worth your attention. However, there are running costs you should factor in before you buy.
Low-cost printers do their best work on high-quality (and higher-cost) glossy paper. Much of this stock sells for $1 a sheet.
Cartridge replacement costs also need to be figured out. If all your printing is going to be full-colour A4 glossy-stock photos, don't expect the cartridges, or your money, to go far. Using the draft or economy-mode wherever possible is one way to drive the cost per page down. It also reduces the print quality so you may have to take the good with the bad.
So long as you keep these elements in mind, the following models are the best for less than $200 we've seen so far.
CANON BJC-255SP
This costs about $180 and won't deafen the neighbours with its performance. It's a three-colour printer, but you'll need to swap the cartridges every time you switch between mono (black) and colour printing.
It comes with two cartridges, a high-capacity black and a tri-colour (cyan, magenta, yellow) tank, plus a storage container to keep fresh the one you're not using.
It prints with a top resolution of 360x360 dots per inch (dpi) and can fake 720x360dpi in mono using smoothing techniques.
What it lacks in quality it makes up in fun: Canon has options for T-shirt transfers and fabric sheets as well as glossy paper, envelopes and transparencies.
To give it its PhotoRealism tag, the
BJC-255SP can use Canon's BC06 photo cartridge, which improves contrast in photo printing. The BJC-255SP doesn't have the same colour depth as a four-colour printer but it's reasonable value for money.
Value rating: 7/10
Price: About $180
EPSON STYLUS COLOR 300
This four-colour unit has quite reasonable resolution, coming in at 720x360dpi on plain paper in both mono and colour. For about $175, it's quite good value.
It doesn't offer the same ink options as the Canon, but it doesn't need to. This printer uses only one ink cartridge but Epson has managed to squeeze all four colours into the one container. Having full access to all four colours gives it improved photo quality since it can create the contrast you need, making blacks more black than standard three-colour printers.
It's not a speedy printer, though none of the less-than-$200 jobs will ever break any speed records. The driver software comes on CD-ROM and supports Windows 3.1 upwards.
Value rating: 71/2/10
Price: About $175
HEWLETT-PACKARD
DESKJET 420C
HP claims it can offer full-colour printing with only three colours, although the black you get with this colour cartridge is simply all three ink colours dumped on top of one another. The resolution is fairly low by comparison. It only manages 600x300dpi on mono and 300x300dpi in colour. The fewer dots, the more noticeable they become and the more grainy the image starts to look.
The paper tray can handle up to 50 A4 pages as well as other media, including transparencies, greeting card stock and glossy paper. As for software, the 420C will run on just about anything, from DOS 3.3 to Windows 98. If you've got an old 386 lying around, it will even work with that.
Overall, a lack of colours and resolution doesn't put this on top of the pile. It's good, however, if you want to run on older computers and operating systems.
Value rating: 61/2/10
Price: About $195
LEXMARK JETPRINTER 1100
This is another three-colour printer, but it offers a full 600x600dpi resolution, the best you'll find in the less-than-$200 class. It also comes with an edition of Micrografx Windows Draw 6 Print Studio, which will allow you to create your own masterpieces before you print them. It comes with 20,000 photos and clip art images, Internet-ready artwork and an easy-to-use tool to publish your work on the Net.
As for the printer itself, it's rated at 3.5 pages per minute (ppm) for mono and 2ppm for colour, which is about as good as you'll get in this price range. Lexmark also has banner paper available that lets you print A4-width banners without having to do the old sticky-tape nightmare. This is great for birthdays, plus you can also get T-shirt transfers. There's also a waterproof black ink for those special jobs.
Overall, this is a good printer lacking that fourth colour. Four would have made it great.
Value rating: 71/2/10
Price: About $190
© 1998 Sydney Morning Herald