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Take a look at our latest Buyers' Guide to printers. |
When you’re considering a new printer purchase, remember that all printers are not the same. The subtle differences can make one unit ideal and another a complete waste of money for your particular needs.
The bulk of consumer sales – and thus the bulk of units you’ll find down the local computer shop – is in multifunction inkjet printers. These are units that print, scan and copy, with some higher-end models also offering faxing capabilities. Then as the price rises, you’ll find the MFP features drop away in favour of printers with more advanced photo printing capabilities.
Photo inkjet, or regular inkjet?
Even within inkjet printers, there’s a fair amount of differentiation. Your basic inkjet uses a mix of the three primary colours to print colour, with a dedicated black cartridge for monochrome printing. The three primary colours are usually sold as a single "colour" cartridge. These units will print photos - and many are labelled as "photo printers" - but if your primary printing interest is in photographic reproduction, you should consider a printer that uses a more complex, six-ink tank solution. This adds three colours – cyan, magenta and yellow – to the ink mix. The upside is that six-ink printers usually deliver richer colours and more authentic photo reproduction. The downside is, of course, that you need to buy more ink tanks and the per-photo print cost is usually higher than on a three-ink tank model.
Too many consumers only look at the sticker price on the printer box when working out which printer to buy, but often the box price is only the start of what you’ll pay. Printer consumables are a huge part of the printer business, especially at the budget end of the market, where margins are razor-thin and vendors look to make all their money in post-purchase sales. It’s quite common for the cartridge supplied with a new printer to be labelled as a "starter" cartridge. This is vendor pretty-speak for "we put about half as much ink in here as we normally would, so you’ll have to go out and buy a new ink tank sharpish".
You should also weigh up how much you currently print, or are likely to, when making your printer decision. At the very low end of printing, it may be worth going without altogether. There’s no end of stores that’ll sell you very cheap 4x6" photo prints – we’ve seen as low as 10c per print in bulk – and you can’t match that kind of costing with a home printer, even just in the cost of consumables and ink. Likewise, most copy shops will do short runs of single documents at quite cheap prices.
At higher end uses, we’d suggest looking at the better photo printers if you’re a camera-obsessed type, or a low-end laser printer if most of what you do is document printing.
This isn’t a comparative review per se, and we haven’t given a "Best In Test" award for this particular feature, as the differences between a small photo printer (such as the Canon Selphy) and a duplexing laser (such as the Lexmark E250d) are so great. User needs vary a lot, and we’ve structured the reviews to highlight why you might (or might not) want a particular model instead, with a recommendation for each printer as to which user it best suits.
TESTED & RATED
Prices quoted are an average calculated from online retailers’ sites. You will save by shopping around. Check warranty details carefully. NetGuide is not responsible for changes in availability or pricing.
 Canon Selphy ES1
NZ approx. price: $300
Site: www.canon.co.nz
The Selphy ES1 is a cute, very portable printer with one function in mind – printing photos. Powered either by AC power or a battery, it’s extremely portable with its own carrying handle. The Selphy ES1 uses a dye sublimation method rather than inkjet for photo printing. This means you buy the ink ribbons and photo paper together, and always get a set number of shots per ink cartridge. A quick bit of online shopping for photo packs revealed a rough cost per print of around 40c. The photo quality of the postcard-sized prints the ES1 somewhat noisily spits out was very good and, unlike inkjet prints, ready to handle straight away. The downside to the ES1 is that it’s locked into a particular printing solution and can’t really be used to print other materials, unless you enjoy really tiny and shiny printed documents.
Best suited for: Those who want photos on the go, or don’t have space for a full-sized photo solution.
 Canon Pixma MP610
NZ approx. price: $320
Site: www.canon.co.nz
The Pixma MP610 is a multifunction printer with a certain focus on photo printing, although it uses a five-tank (two black and cyan, magenta and yellow) solution. It’s certainly visually striking, with smooth silver lines that hide the scanner tray and LCD display panel quite well. It’s a USB-only connected model, which is slightly disappointing; similar units from HP or Lexmark offer wireless in this kind of price range. Where the MP610 doesn’t disappoint is in the area of print speed it was a quick printer in our tests and one that delivered decent quality prints to boot.
Best suited for: Those who don’t need a networked MFP.
 HP Photosmart D7460
NZ approx. price: $320
Site: www.hp.co.nz
After a very lengthy and noisy setup procedure, our review sample of the D7460 was ready to go. It’s a six-tank inkjet with the option for USB, Ethernet or wireless printing. One nice feature here is that it connects directly to your wireless router, making itself available for any PC on your network without needing to be shared from one specific, always-on unit. It comes with a large, touch-sensitive LCD display panel that runs the main features of the printer. One catch that we did notice with the D7460 was that larger photo prints coming out of it tended to be rather wet; you need to let them dry comprehensively or run the risk of smudging features. Print quality was very good, however.
Best suited for: Those who need to print photos beyond 4x6, but don’t need a scanner/copier to boot.
 HP Photosmart C8180
NZ approx. price: $599
Site: www.hp.co.nz
Just under $600 should buy you a heck of a lot of printer – and in the case of the C8180, it certainly buys you a lot of features. This is an MFC whose feature list is exhausting just to type out: photo printing, wireless/Ethernet/USB and Bluetooth printing, faxing and even direct LightScribe printing onto compatible optical discs. Lightscribe is an HP-specific technology, but you’ll have to buy rather more expensive Lightscribe-compatible discs to make use of this feature. The drive does work otherwise as a DVD writer for backing up your images, which is an interesting feature, although one we’d suspect most users would probably do from a dedicated PC more often. The C8180 is a big unit, but aside from a noisy initial setup (similar to the D7460) it was quiet and quick in operation. It also didn’t suffer from ejecting really wet prints in the same way that the D7460 did. The C8180 is a nice printer, but $599 is a lot to spend, and unless you’re likely to use the DVD writer a lot for photo backups, we suspect it’s money wasted, rather than wisely invested.
Best suited for: Serious photo enthusiasts with money to burn.
 Epson CX5500
NZ approx.price: $99
Site: www.epson.co.nz
The CX5500 has the distinction of being the cheapest MFP submitted to us for review, although if you hunt around there are cheaper. Less expensive printers, however, tend to feature ink cartridges that can cost more than the printers they’re servicing, which doesn’t strike us as all that environmentally sound. Anyhow, at this price point you’ve got to expect a few compromises, and the CX5500 shows how systems this cheap can be built and sold. There’s no preview LCD for photo printing; only a scant few buttons for printer-based control, no networking and no photo card slots at all. This is about as basic as an MFP can get. That being said, the output of the CX5500 wasn’t all that bad. It was noisy in printing – and the rather lightweight printer body tended to vibrate quite a bit while printing – but the eventual output quality for both text and photos was quite reasonable.
Best suited for: Those on a strict budget.
 Epson RX610
NZ approx. price: $299
Site: www.epson.co.nz
This is an MFP with plenty of bells and whistles, including a tray for printing onto suitable CD/DVD media. Setup was simple, aside from the rather odd USB cable placement, which will eat up about 20cm of your USB cable. Like the similarly priced Canon and Epson units, the RX610 includes a whole host of functionality that’s activated from the front control panel of the printer itself, which is centered around a small preview LCD. While it wasn’t the quickest of printers in our photo test, we were impressed by how relatively quiet it was while printing.
Best suited for: Those who don’t want a noisy MFP.
 Lexmark E250d
NZ approx. price: $300
Site: www.lexmark.co.nz
Of course, if you don’t print that many photos, it doesn’t make that much sense to spend money on a colour printer. This is where low-cost monochrome laser printers, such as Lexmark’s E250d shine. The two keys to the E250d are the speed of printing – unmatched for documents by any other printer we’ve reviewed – and the relatively low cost to print those pages. Because laser printers are pure document machines, there’s less fiddling around with costly ink, and as the E250d includes inbuilt duplexing, it can bring the print costs down considerably. With the money saved on printing supplies, you could even order a few store-printed photos along the way. The E250d isn’t a small printer, although it’s fairly titchy compared to most small office laser printers.
Best suited for: Small home offices and people without digital cameras.
 Kodak Easyshare 5500
NZ approx. price: $340
Site: www.kodak.co.nz
The Easyshare 5500 may retail for a little more than the full-feature MFP printers we’ve evaluated here, but Kodak’s hook for it is that you make that up on the printing costs end; black cartridges are a reasonable $16 and colour ones only $24. It uses a single colour cartridge for printing, which could be a problem if you do a lot of printing in, say, red, and then run out. That aside, the 5500 should be an economical printer to run for most printing tasks. Photos were nicely crisp, but text could have been a touch better defined. The Easyshare 5500 makes the most sense if you’re going to do a lot of photo printing, but don’t want high printing costs.
Best suited for: Photo fanatics with tiny wallets.
Whose printer paper should I use?
While all vendors insist that their brand of paper delivers the best results in their printers, the reality of photo printing is a little more complex. The vendor can fine-tune the photo paper production process to favour the way that their inkjet nozzles deliver ink, and in turn how it’s absorbed by the paper. This also plays a role in photo longevity, as ink that’s properly absorbed deep into the paper will leave a more permanent mark that’s less prone to sun fading. No photo lasts forever, but most vendors will quote a 90-year plus lifespan when using their premium papers. We don’t quite have the time to sit around and test them on that exhaustively, but ad hoc tests with prints we’ve done over the past five years do show some fading over time. All of that shouldn’t tie you to a particular vendor’s paper, however. There can be obvious cost savings in switching brands, and depending on your needs for a photo – or how fussy over fidelity you actually are – you can do well with other brands. We’ve also seen some interesting results using non-vendor papers in photo printers, with some room for artistic expression within the (sometimes surprising) results.
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