Image Makers
You can pay a little or a lot for a photo-capable printer. Our lab tests of 16 new models uncover the real values.In the same way that digital cameras have revolutionized how we take pictures, ink jet printers have revolutionized how we print them. Gone are the days of waiting two weeks for a reprint or an enlargement. Now you simply turn on your PC and load some glossy paper into your ink jet printer. In 5 minutes, you have an image that rivals anything produced by your neighborhood photo lab.
We looked at 16 ink jet printers from Canon, Epson, Hewlett-Packard, and Lexmark. Of these, we classified 7 as general-purpose models, with prices ranging from $79 to $200 and features appropriate for home and small-office use. Such printers work well for printing text and graphics files, as well as the occasional photo.
The other nine printers, designed with the digital photographer in mind, are a bit pricier, ranging from $149 to $699. Most of the photo printers we tested use six or more colors of ink to provide subtler shading in continuous tones; the exceptions are Canon's I850 Photo Printer and S530D Direct Connect Photo Printer, which use the standard four inks. Some printers, such as the HP Photosmart 7550 and the Canon S530D, have slots that can accept your camera's flash-memory card, or they let you use a USB cable to bypass your computer and print shots directly from your camera. HP's Photosmart 7550 bundles a small LCD screen like the one on your digital camera that allows you to preview images and perform rudimentary adjustments before printing. Some of the models we tested, including the Canon S530D and the HP Photosmart 7550, don't come with USB cables, so check the box to determine whether the supplies you need are included.
In our image quality tests, Epson's Stylus Photo 2200 surpassed its competition to earn our Best Buy award in the photo printer category. At $699, it costs more than any other photo printer on our chart, but it produced color photographs and gray-scale images that went above and beyond those of the other printers we reviewed. The 2200 also has plenty of extra features, such as wide-format printing (up to 13 inches wide and 44 inches long) and a FireWire port, and it was the only model we reviewed that came with a USB 2.0 high-speed port. The Best Buy on the general-purpose chart, the Canon I320 Color Bubble Jet Printer, is the least-expensive model we reviewed for this article. The I320 competently prints text, photos, and graphics, and though it doesn't have exceptionally fast print speeds, its $79 price tag and inexpensive ink cartridges make it an economical choice.
Features Comparison: Top 10 Ink Jet Printers (chart)
Testing Ink Jets
The PC World Test Center ran time tests for each printer from a 1.6-GHz Pentium 4-based PC equipped with 256MB of RAM and running Windows XP Home. All the printers were connected to the test PC via a USB 2.0 adapter. The Test Center printed out monochrome text, line art, and color and gray-scale photo samples for each printer. For photo printing, we used each manufacturer's recommended paper, settings, and inks. We used plain white paper and default settings for all nonphoto tests. A panel of judges rated the image quality of output samples. We timed how long each unit took to produce prints, and in calculating overall ratings we factored in price, ease of use, features, support policies, and cost of ink.
You might expect photo printers to be faster at printing photographs. But the results of our speed tests showed that general-purpose units produce photos at about the same rate that photo printers do. The general-purpose ink jets averaged about 0.43 pages per minute when printing our 5-by-7-inch test photo, while the average output of the photo printers was a slightly faster 0.51 pages per minute with the same file. (That's too small a difference in speed to be very noticeable in everyday printing.) In our tests, the Canon models printed photographs faster than the printers from other manufacturers did, with the Canon S530D topping the ratings at 0.77 pages per minute on our test photo.
On graphics files and on mixed text-and-graphics files, the photo printers again displayed a slight speed edge that would not be especially noticeable during real-life use. The fastest model overall on our chart was the Canon I850 Photo Printer, which cranked out text at 7.7 pages per minute and printed our test photograph in 75 seconds.
Only in our timed text-printing test did the photo printers in our roundup trail the general-purpose models: The general-purpose printers produced text documents at an average speed of 5.6 pages per minute, versus an average of 3.6 pages per minute for the photo printers. However, the text from the photo models appeared darker and crisper.
The general-purpose models turned out pleasing pictures, but the specialized photo printers--especially the models that use more than four ink tanks, like the seven-ink-tank Epson Stylus Photo 2200--printed the best-looking photographs, with smooth gradations, accurate colors, and realistic skin tones. With seven ink cartridges installed simultaneously (two of which hold the same type of black ink), the Epson Stylus Photo 960 earned a photo quality rating of Outstanding, producing photos that were nearly identical to the original test images. The HP Photosmart 7550 printed superb pictures, but fell short of the quality we saw in photo prints from the top printers on our chart. Interestingly, details in photos printed on the Photosmart 7550 actually appeared sharper than in the original image.
Prints from general-purpose models lacked the rich skin tones and smooth gradations we saw in output from photo printers, but we rated the photo quality from most of them as Good. One exception was the Lexmark Z55se Color Jetprinter, whose photos showed visible graininess, washed-out colors, and ashen skin tones; we rated it Fair.
See our Features Comparison chart for in-depth reviews of the top ten printers we tested, and see the end of this article for reviews of the six printers that missed the chart.
Drops From Many Nozzles
All ink jet printers have a printhead that travels across the page, laying down a fine spray of ink droplets. Between sweeps of the head--which contains many nozzles, each firing a single color of ink--the paper advances through the printer. Though all ink jet printers share this technology, the various manufacturers have introduced their own twists.
Hewlett-Packard's printers use thermal ink jet technology, in which heat is applied to expel droplets of ink from microscopic nozzles in the printheads. Those heads use just one size of nozzle, producing a single size of droplet.
The Canon I850 Photo Printer has dual sets of nozzles that produce two different droplet sizes. Canon product manager John Lamb explains that the I850's novel printhead configuration lays down black first and then color, always leading with cyan, following with magenta, and ending with yellow. The black nozzles are offset, improving contrast by layering black ink under the color ink. In our tests, the Canon units we reviewed took top scores for speed; their photo image quality was good, but not outstanding.
Like HP and Canon, Lexmark uses thermal ink jet technology in its printers. The Lexmark printheads have 3-picoliter nozzles for detail and 10-picoliter nozzles for speed (3 picoliters is equivalent to 3 billionths of a liter). Printers from Lexmark put down either black or color ink each time the printhead travels across the page. This allows for more ink-drying time than with printers that put down all four colors in one pass. However, this process also doubles the number of printhead passes, which slows down printing. The only Lexmark model we tested, the Z55se Color Jetprinter, produced text at a respectable 6.4 pages per minute, but it took almost 5 minutes to print our test photo, tying for last place in our test group. It printed above-average-looking text but, as noted previously, only adequate photos.
Epson printers use a proprietary micropiezo technology to fire ink. An electrical charge is applied to a piezoelectric crystal to pull, and then push, the ink within the nozzle. By varying the strength of electrical charges, the technology causes different-size ink droplets to break away from the nozzle. This enables Epson to use nozzles of a single size to produce up to eight different droplet sizes. We saw strong photo quality from Epson's printers, and its two photo models were especially impressive. On text, monochrome line art, and gray-scale photos, though, Epson printers received less-than-stellar quality scores.
Eventually My Prints Will Come
Because of the large amount of data that is transmitted during photo printing, images can seem slow to print. Using a USB interface rather than a parallel port can minimize the wait, but other factors--including the printer's engine speed, its amount of memory, and the speed of your computer--also affect how rapidly documents and photos print. At this point, relatively few printers use the USB 2.0 or FireWire interfaces-- most printers still aren't fast enough to take advantage of the additional bandwidth that those standards provide. Be sure to read the fine print when you see USB 2.0 on a printer's box: Most of the time when you look closely you'll see that it says "USB 2.0 Full Speed," which is just a new name for USB 1.1. Of the models we tested, only the Epson Stylus Photo 2200, which also has a FireWire port, supports the faster USB 2.0 High Speed (we refer to USB 2.0 High Speed as USB 2.0 and USB 2.0 Full Speed as USB 1.1). Despite having the fastest interface, the Epson Stylus Photo 2200's text printing speed of 2.9 ppm and photo print speed of 0.2 ppm lagged behind the performance of many models equipped with the slower USB 1.1 port, including Canon's I850 Photo Printer, the overall speed leader. We noticed that the printers delivering the best photo quality tended to be slower. Obviously, patience is still a virtue when it comes to printing photos.
Dots Before Your Eyes
If you look very closely, you can make out the minuscule dots on a page from an ink jet printer, but usually your eye picks out only the patterns created by the ink droplets. Ink jet printers create those patterns by using halftoning, the same process used to create photographs in newspapers and magazines. Dots of different colors are arranged to appear as continuous color tones. The smallest droplets that the ink jet printers in our tests produced ranged between 6 and 2 picoliters (see "Tiny Droplets Form a Big Picture").
Most general-purpose printers use four basic ink colors: CMYK, or cyan (blue), magenta (red), yellow, and black. The Canon S830D, Epson's Stylus Photo 825, Stylus Photo 925, and Stylus Photo 960, and the HP Photosmart 7550 use six colors at once, adding a light magenta and a light cyan to the CMYK mix. The Epson Stylus Photo 2200 uses seven ink tanks at once (the seventh color is light black, designed to improve subtle shades and contrast in photos).
The light cyan and light magenta colors help photo printers produce smoother gradations and less-visible dot patterns in very light areas. A light yellow is unnecessary, since individual dots of regular yellow are almost imperceptible to the human eye, according to Canon's Lamb. Four-color printers that can produce variable-size droplets (such as those from Canon, Lexmark, and Epson) approximate the effect of light cyan and light magenta with smaller ink droplets.
Match Ink to Paper
Although it may seem like just one more way for printer manufacturers to separate you from your money, making sure that you use the proper inks and paper will improve both the quality and the longevity of your prints.
You'll always get the best results when printing photographs on paper that matches your printer's ink, whether it be pigment- or dye-based. (Pigmented inks contain small, waterproof color flecks that make them more fade-resistant than water-soluble, dye-based inks, which typically last only six months to a year without fading.) And the best papers for your printer are usually those made by your printer's manufacturer. Vendors optimize their printers for specific kinds of paper and ink--usually their own proprietary blend--so if you use paper different from what the manufacturer recommends, your prints may fade quickly, according to Henry Wilhelm, founder and president of Wilhelm Imaging Research. Wilhelm's lab derives the longevity of papers and inks by conducting special high-intensity light, humidity, and temperature tests that simulate typical indoor display conditions. By putting prints in a controlled environment and increasing the amount of light that a typical room would receive in a day, Wilhelm can induce fading, changes in color balance, and staining normally occurring over months or years of display. (See "The Fade Factor" to learn more about Wilhelm's latest tests of paper and ink longevity.)
Paper Trade-Offs
Photo media comes in a range of surface textures, including glossy, semigloss, luster, and matte. Your choice is largely a matter of personal preference, but it also depends on what you plan to do with your prints.
An ink jet printer can place dots more accurately on a smooth surface. And the smoother the surface, the sharper the print will appear to your eye. For that reason, glossy paper might seem like a better choice for smaller prints. Unfortunately, glossy surfaces show fingerprints more easily than others and tend to crack when folded, so matte paper may work better for photos that will be handled frequently, such as wallet-size prints.
Photo-quality media is coated with either a polymer-based layer or a porous ink-receiving layer. Polymer coatings usually feel sticky to the touch and take a long time to dry, but they have good stability over time. On the other hand, this type of paper has low resistance to moisture and humidity, so storing prints in a dry place is key to their long-term survival. You should use only dye-based inks, like those in the Epson Stylus Photo 960, on polymer-coated media; because pigment-based inks are insoluble, their particles would sit on the surface of the paper and could scratch off easily.
Porous media dries much more quickly and has better water resistance than polymer-coated media does. It also accepts pigment-based inks (which are naturally water resistant) readily. Porous media is generally more expensive, however. Its surface is exposed to air, so it is more prone to fading and discoloration. All of the Canon printers we tested use pigment-based inks and porous photo papers.
Currently, Lexmark printers use dye-based inks. The company does not have its own line of photo media; instead it optimizes its printers for Kodak ink jet photo paper, which it recommends.
HP's Photosmart 7550 combines the best of both worlds: It provides three ink cartridges--black, photo, and standard--with both pigment- and dye-based inks. The black cartridge is a pigmented ink designed for text printing on plain paper; the ink will not adhere well to photo paper. The standard color ink cartridge, however, contains dye-based inks used for both plain paper and photos. The photo ink cartridge contains light cyan, light magenta, and a photo black; for photo printing, the standard and photo cartridges are used at the same time. The Photosmart 7550 earned a score of Good for text quality, and its test photos (printed using the dye-based photo black ink) showed wonderfully crisp details. Even though the black tones looked a little murky, HP's 7550 received a score of Very Good for photo quality.
HP's general-purpose Deskjet 5550 includes only standard black and color cartridges, but you can buy a photo color cartridge separately and swap it with the standard black when you want to print photos. The company's general-purpose models offer pigment-based black inks as well, boosting their text quality. The $99 Deskjet 3820 made photo prints with fairly good details, and it earned the highest score among general-purpose printers for text, producing bright and sharp output.
The Numbers Game
Printers control ink coverage and appearance with droplet size and ink colors, but another factor influencing print quality is resolution.
The mushrooming dots-per-inch (or resolution) figures on printer spec sheets--they now go up to 5760 dpi--seem too high to be true; you have to wonder what good that extra resolution does. Manufacturers use those numbers to grab your attention in the computer store, but when it comes to resolution, higher isn't always better. The dots-per-inch figure is a measure of the number of points on a square inch of paper where the printhead can theoretically place dots. The printer may fire an ink droplet onto any of those points, but if it actually put ink on more than a small fraction of those spots, the paper would be completely saturated with ink, and you'd see only a muddy blob.
Today's ink jet printers can produce far more dots than your eye can perceive. Even the lowest-resolution printer we tested, HP's 1200-by-1200-dpi Deskjet 3820, offered bright and detailed photo prints. While many elements affect the quality of your print, a printer's maximum resolution is no longer an issue. In fact, our top-rated photo printer offers only 2880 by 1440 dpi.
Though ink jet printers are capable of high resolutions, what's important is the resolution of the image you send to the printer. The larger the print size, the more pixels you must have in the original image to maintain optimum image quality. In our June 2002 article "How to Print Perfect Photographs," we recommend using an image that is no less than 1600 by 2000 pixels for printing an 8-by-10-inch photo. A good rule of thumb is that images snapped with a 2-megapixel camera are best for 5-by-7-inch prints and those from a 3-megapixel camera work for 8-by-10-inch prints.
Matching Colors
You may have had the frustrating experience of seeing a vibrant photograph displayed on screen, only to find that when you printed it, those bright colors turned dark and dingy. What happened?
The problem is that your printer and monitor didn't interpret the color information in the photograph the same way. Currently, two color-matching technologies, Print Image Matching (PIM) and Exchangeable Image File Format for Digital Still Cameras (EXIF) Print, attempt to address this problem. Each technology requires a compatible digital camera that saves additional data in the header of the image file, which your printer uses to reproduce the image faithfully.
All digital camera manufacturers support the open-standard EXIF for storing information--such as the date and time recorded and the orientation of the shot--into the header of the image file. A few months ago EXIF Print (or EXIF 2.2) was announced; this standard introduces new data fields that are also stored in JPEG file headers. Many companies--including Adobe, Canon, Epson, HP, Kodak, and Nikon--currently support EXIF Print.
A couple of years ago, Epson launched its own color-matching technology, Print Image Matching. It uses proprietary extensions to the EXIF header to store additional data in digital photographs. (PIM works only with Epson printers.) Since PIM was launched, Casio, Kyocera, Minolta, Panasonic, Pentax, Ricoh, Sony, and Toshiba have signed on to support that standard in their digital cameras. Notably absent from that list are rival printer manufacturers Canon and HP.
Printing Pretty Pictures
Most cameras encode images using a color space for monitors that's called SRGB--a standard developed by HP, Microsoft, and others to enable consistent color reproduction from monitor to monitor. Screens can display only a limited range of colors, however, so some color information is sacrificed when an image is stored in SRGB. Ink jet printers can reproduce a wider spectrum of colors--one that's closer to the full capabilities of a digital camera.
The extra information in PIM and EXIF compensate for the reduced color space of your monitor, as well as account for lighting conditions and your digital camera's settings. Essentially, PIM sends instructions to an Epson printer, telling it how to handle the image. In contrast, EXIF Print records the camera's settings at the time the photograph was taken and lets an EXIF Print-enabled printer, such as the Canon S530D, determine how those images should appear on paper.
Improve Your Image
To take advantage of the automatic color-correction features of PIM or EXIF Print, you must print directly from your original image file. If you use an image editing package such as Adobe Photoshop or Ulead PhotoImpact to make color adjustments, you'll lose PIM and EXIF Print's benefits.
Different printer manufacturers implement EXIF Print in different ways. For example, Canon requires you to use its Easy Photo Print software to use EXIF Print, while HP embeds it in the printer driver. Printers that receive output directly from your camera or memory card implement the color-matching technology in the printer.
New printers from Epson support both PIM and EXIF Print, though Epson recommends using a PIM-enabled camera with its six-color ink jet printers. Several of Canon's models, including the S530D, already support EXIF Print in the company's Easy Photo Print software. Updated software for the Canon I850 and other models will be available for download soon. HP offers a printer driver for its Deskjet 5550 that supports EXIF Print; it's available for download from the HP Web site, and HP promises that it will have updated drivers for more models soon.
If you're thinking about buying a new photo printer, first check to see which of the two color-matching standards your digital camera supports (far more cameras support EXIF Print than PIM).
The Bottom Line
Photo printers come in as many variations as photographers do, so there's bound to be a model with the combination of features, image quality, and price that suits your budget and your specific needs. But whichever printer you choose, one thing is for sure: You'll never have to drop off film at the drugstore again.
Paul Jasper is a technology consultant and freelance writer based in San Francisco. Dan Littman is a contributing editor at PC World.
Fancy Photo Printers Offer Extra Features at Your Fingertips
Along with their specialized inks, many photo printers come with an extra measure of convenience, in the form of controls that you can use from the printer's front panel instead of within the driver. This means you don't have to wait for your PC to power up to print your photos.
HP's Photosmart 7550 is the example shown here, but most of the photo printers we reviewed provide some combination of these conveniences or similar ones, and lower-priced models offer several of them--such as LCD preview screens and media slots--as extra-cost options.
Front-panel buttons let you do things like select shots, zoom, and send photos to e-mail.
An LCD preview screen lets you see what you're printing. HP puts menus on this screen, too.
Memory card slots can read flash-media formats such as Memory Stick, Secure Digital, and CompactFlash directly from the printer.
Additional ink tanks like the three in the Photosmart 7550 allow you to use more colors: This HP holds photo, standard-color, and text-black cartridges simultaneously.
A front-mounted port lets you print images directly from a digital camera; HP's USB port works only with the company's own digital cameras.
Should You Let a Professional Print Your Digital Photos?
When you want something done right, often the best thing to do is hire a professional. To see whether a professional photo processor could make a better 8-by-10-inch print of our digital photo than we could, we sent it to Ofoto, and we printed it using general-purpose and photo printers. We found Ofoto easier to use than the printers, but we didn't like waiting to get our prints. The Ofoto picture was better than the print from the HP 5550 (which missed our chart), but not as good as the Epson Stylus Photo 960's print.
Tiny Droplets Form a Big Picture
You may not see all the dots that your printer lays down on the
page, but the configuration of those tiny dots can mean the difference between
a grainy photo and one that you're proud to put in a picture frame.
Ink jet printers deposit dots of ink in blended patterns that are designed to simulate continuous color tones, and they have varying methods of doing so. To examine how the printer manufacturers' different techniques compare with one another, we took a small sample area of a photo print and enlarged it 750 percent.
Six- and seven-ink printers use light cyan and light magenta to help create smoother gradations and subtler dot patterns. We saw marvelous photo quality from Epson's Stylus Photo 2200, using seven inks. HP's 7550 created extremely detailed prints with six inks. Canon's I550, a general-purpose, four-color ink jet, printed good-looking photos with colors that were a tad washed out. Photos from Lexmark's four-color ink jet looked grainy, with dull colors.
