Prints Charming

The Age

Thursday August 7, 2008

Drew Turney

Drew Turney puts some multifunction printers to the test.

THE copy-scan-print multifunction printer market is like the razor-blade business - you buy a razor cheaply but pay an ongoing premium for the blades.

Off-the-shelf price is only the beginning. With replacement ink cartridges costing $15-$50, depending on the quality, calculate your ongoing costs upfront.

Work out how much you'll be printing in both colour (or black only) and quality - anything from plain text to high-resolution photos. Compare the number of copies you'll get out of each brand's ink cartridges for their respective prices.Most multifunction centres connect via a USB cable, and if you've ever tried to share a printer over a network you know how tricky it can be. If you have a small office or home network, it's worth looking at models that connect to your router and let you install the software to access them on each system.

If you have multiple PC platforms, be prepared for compatibility issues. Several of our contenders suffered installation and operating glitches.

We opted not to look at models with built-in fax. In the scan-and-email capability of the internet age, it's hard to justify the extra cost (anything up to $100). In fact, you might ask why you need to print at all now everything's digitised. Put simply, the digital-content revolution means the desktop printer now relies as much on printing photos from your camera or external device as it does PC documents.

Any decent multifunction centre will make photo printing easy. Most brand-name models can bypass your PC altogether, letting you connect a camera or standard-model memory card. Doing so will load the card or camera as a removable disk on your desktop, making the multifunction device an erstwhile file server to copy your images.

Use the display on the multifunction centre to navigate between images and zoom, crop or print them. If you're planning a lot of memory-card printing, make sure you're happy with the display's functionality. Some models will claim astounding page-per-minute counts, but these are for simple tasks. Printing from a Mac, using photos or documents with lots of images or printing in colour will reduce the page-per-minute rate drastically.

All four contenders produced five-10 pages per minute of decent quality printing, less so for photos.

Most multifunction centres should be easy to set up. All our models came with detailed, consumer-friendly documentation. Ask to see the manuals before you buy because anything less explanatory is likely to be a lower-quality knock-off.

If you intend getting your photos right before you print them, some multifunction centres fully cater for your needs. The software of some models contains little more than device drivers but some will come with programs that help you do everything from CD labels to detailed image manipulation. A handy add-on to the scan feature in some models is optical character recognition, which can read the text from a scan and import a fully editable version into your word processor. The copy-print-scan trinity makes most multifunction centre models seem similar but options such as printing direct to CDs using a special tray and onboard data capacity to save prints for later output make each one different. Finally, check how each manufacturer allows recycle of its ink cartridges.

The contenders

Epson RX610

$299

4/5.5

epson.com.au

This has the best copy and output quality of all four contenders. Hi-res photos look like you just collected your prints from the developer and the quality on copies was on top of the list, thanks to six separate ink cartridges for higher contrast. CD printing was straightforward but a feature to back up the connected memory card didn't work.

Canon Pixma MP610

$299

3/5.5

canon.com.au

The fastest printer under real-world conditions, this has a full suite of copy controls. It has a compact, foldaway design that makes it unobtrusive and has the largest, most user-friendly display. A single button allows you to check ink levels but there's no image-tinkering software. It also inexplicably refused to scan when connected to a Mac.

HP C6280

$349

4/5

hp.com.au

The only contender that was easily networkable. After a software install on each machine, it became the network printer and scanner seamlessly. Where every other model takes paper in the top, the C6280 has a front-loading cassette that holds print and photo paper at the same time. Well-placed controls make it easy.

Lexmark X4550

$199

1/5.5

lexmark.com.au

Wireless connectivity promised great things but the X4550 had several problems. It wasn't too difficult getting connection with a Windows PC, but even after connecting successfully to a Mac via USB cable, it kept inexplicably going offline. A black LCD display made it fiddly, and every other contender beat it in colour reproduction.

Verdict

On the delicate balancing act of post-sales costs, the Epson looks like the best, with cheaper cartridges than the similarly priced Canon, but they have a lower yield. In the same way, don't be fooled by the low price of the Lexmark, which has the most expensive cartridges. The HP's superior useability and more robust approach is reflected in the higher price, but for the colour in the end result, the Epson RX610 wins out.