All Printers Feeds

Canon PIXMA MP610

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The Canon MP610 has a secret weapon in the shape of a second black ink cartridge in its arsenal.

Uniquely, rather than adding photo magenta and photo cyan inks to the line-up for more effective photo output, Canon includes both pigment-based and dye-based inks as standard, along with the cyan, magenta and yellow cartridges.

The result is spectacularly fast mono and colour document printing, along with photo quality that simply outdoes the competition.

Fantasic print quality

Along with beautiful skin tones, great contrast, vivid colour and exceptional sharpness, photo printing speed is blisteringly quick, even in top-quality mode.

Indeed, Canon itself seems to be so happy with the photo quality of its five-ink arrangement that it's dropped the more conventional six-ink photo printers from its product range altogether.

Getting back to document printing, the MP610 automatic duplex for outputting double-sided documents and its dual paper input tray together make it painless to regularly print on different types of media.

Fastest, cheapest

Along with the fastest, cheapest and best quality printing among its peers, the MP610 is also rather special in the scanning department, with a class-leading 4,800 x 9,600dpi resolution scanner that produces wonderfully sharp scans with impeccable colour rendition.

This is great not only for high-speed photocopying, but also for scanning photos and documents into your PC.

Rounding off the feature set, the multi-format memory card reader, colour LCD and intuitive controls make direct photo printing a breeze. We really couldn't ask for more from the Canon MP610.

Lexmark X4550

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Considering that Lexmark is such a big name in the world of business printing, the X4550 feels surprisingly flimsy, with a build quality that doesn't seem to match the competition.

We can't see this device remaining in one piece for long under heavy office conditions. Its main claim to fame is that it's fully Wi-Fi compatible straight out of the box, and in our tests this proved quick and easy to set up.

Simple setup

Printing from laptops or other wirelessly connected computers from anywhere around the home is certainly a luxury, but crucially the Lexmark fell short of expectations in other areas.

Using the standard capacity ink cartridges supplied with the printer, ink costs are fiendishly expensive, at over 5p per mono print and nearly 12p for colour.

Even replacing these with high capacity cartridges only brings the cost down to 3.7p per mono print, making it twice as expensive to run as either of the Canon printers on test.

Quick, quick, slow

The X4550 is reasonably swift for mono output, but switch to colour and things slow down dramatically. In our tests a single colour DTP page took around three times as long to print or copy, compared with some of its peers.

Photo prints were similarly tardy, especially when switching to Lexmark's optional photo cartridge for a six-ink line-up. Finished prints weren't worth the wait, either, with poor colour rendition and tone.

Scanning is an equally lacklustre affair and while there's a built-in media card reader, there's no colour LCD, so you have to print off an index sheet of images before you can even choose which photos you want to print.

Overall, it's another average performance from the people at Lexmark.

Epson Stylus Photo RX585

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Banishing compromise from its outlook on printing, the Epson RX585 nails its vibrant colours firmly to the mast of photographic output, with a purely dye-based range of six Epson Claria inks.

This means that document printing is definitely second-best, with greyish, faded-looking mono text. More surprisingly, photocopying speeds for colour graphics documents proved particularly slow.

Vibrant pictures

Getting back to the RX585's strong point, colour rendition for photo output is especially vibrant, bright and punchy.

In fact, the Epson tended to boost contrast in many of our test photos, to a point where areas of very light highlights in images were washed out to white, losing definition in the process.

The printer also proved a little harsh for skin tones, giving less pleasing results than the Canon MP620.

Slow prints

Standalone controls are straightforward, making for simple photocopying and photo printing from memory cards. The sharpness, contrast and colour rendition produced by the scanner are impressive but, again, not quite a match for some of its peers.

Speed, or the lack of it, is also a bit of an issue, with the Epson taking about three times as long to output A4 photos in top quality mode. However, dropping from "Best" to normal-quality photo mode has remarkably little impact on quality, while effectively doubling the print speed.

As a photo-specific all-in-one printer, the RX585 has a good range of features and will delight photographers who prefer high-impact, vibrant colour to the often slightly more muted tones of real life.

However, compared with the best of the competition, it's ultimately lacking in versatility.

Kyocera FS-1300DN

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Kyocera was pushing the green message before it became fashionable, and this model continues the tradition.

While many other manufacturers include the developer and drum with the toner cartridge, the FS-1300D's developer and drum are part of the printer - guaranteed for its working life - and the toner cartridge itself is simple and holds only toner.

Official figures put the cost per page at 1.4p. The printer comes with a full cartridge, though half is dumped into an internal reservoir during the first run.

Speedy printing

It can also print on both sides of paper automatically, sucking each sheet back in to print to the reverse.

A 20-page text document took a minute to drop into the output tray when printed single-sided; 30 seconds were added on when using duplex. It's well worth it, and it's a simple checkbox in the Print dialog box.

It's easy to set up, but the PDF manual devotes only a single page to the Mac. It makes no mention of how the printer supports Apple's zero-config Bonjour technology (making it easy to discover the printer on a network, instead of mucking about with the also-supported AppleTalk or IP addresses); nor does it direct you to the Bonjour services option in Safari that makes it a doddle to access the printer's internal config pages to set up network behaviour or security.

Decent print quality

We tested the DN version with an Ethernet port for networking; a USB-only option is also available.

It's around £180, and while you could add a £170 network card to turn it into a DN, that's a pricey way to do it. Our model also had the optional £90 second paper tray; both bins only accept half a ream of paper each.

Print quality isn't stunning, with very slight smearing and some lumpiness in text below 8pt, but it's easily good enough for general office duties.

Images are predictably grainy, though you can crank the resolution up to true 1,200dpi, and PostScript 3 emulation will keep XPress and InDesign users happy.

Canon PIXMA iP4500

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A bargain printer, the iP4500 uses Canon's unique line-up of five ChromaLife 100 inks, combining dye-based cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks with a second, pigment-based black ink. The system works so well in practise that Canon has now dropped conventional six-ink photo printers from its PIXMA range altogether.

No frills

You get no standalone frills with the iP4500, apart from rudimentary PictBridge printing, but the printer is wonderfully easy to live with. Dual input trays are ideal for combining plain paper for workaday printing, along with specialist photo papers, and the printer also supports automatic duplex (double-sided) printing along with quick and easy printing on compatible CDs or DVDs.

Levels of contrast tended to be a little high on some of Canon's older five-ink models but that seems to have been tamed on the new iP4500. Colour rendition is excellent and especially kind to skin tones although, to be picky, vivid blue skies proved very slightly pale in our tests, compared with some of the printers. Other highlights include an ultra-high maximum resolution of 9600dpi, super-fast print speeds and lower running costs than any other A4 photo printer.

HP Photosmart Pro B9180

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For many people, spending £500 on a printer is not an option, but some photographers do like to 'go large' so we hauled in an A3+ printer from HP to give you an idea of what you can expect from a printer of this type.

The HP Photosmart Pro B9180 uses eight pigment-based inks, three of which are black, or at least various shades of grey. This not only extends the colour space of the printer but also makes for excellent mono printing. In our tests, colour prints weren't quite as punchy as some of the dye-based A4 printers, while mono output was exceptional.

The long and winding road

Initial set up of the B9180 is a long-winded process that takes the best part of an hour to complete. Ongoing use is rather more hassle-free with high-capacity ink cartridges that last much longer than average. This is just as well, considering that a full set of replacement cartridges costs a whopping £144 to buy. On the plus side, running costs work out cheaper with the HP than most other printers.

As with most A3+ printers, there's no media card reader or onboard controls for direct photo printing but the HP does at least feature an LCD status panel that keeps you updated on what's going on. Another bonus is that HP sells a particularly impressive range of fine-art photo papers in larger sizes.

Epson Stylus Photo R285

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The Epson R285 is a bare-bones A4 printer which doesn't even include PictBridge support. What you do get, however, is Epson's latest generation of Claria dye-based inks that are delivered from six replaceable cartridges.

The colour range is therefore very good but, in our tests, outright accuracy left a little to be desired, especially when it came to skin tones, which tended to be a little on the cool side. Prints are a little too contrasty and overly saturated in some cases. Highlight detail was also lost in some areas of prints.

Same difference

Print speed is quick in normal quality mode but sluggish if you switch to the best-quality setting. In most cases, there's no discernable difference in prints created at either setting, apart from some very marginal increase in lowlight detail in best-quality mode.

While the R285 is fairly cheap to buy, running costs are a little pricey. Another glaring difference is that, because the black ink is dye-based rather than being a pigment ink, mono text looks feint and greyish, so the R285 can't effectively double up as a document printer as well.

Canon PIXMA MP970

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Aimed at the semi-professional market, the MP970 is Canon's top-of-the-range A4 printer, adding light cyan and light magenta inks to the five-ink line up of its other models such as the iP4500. This means that you still get both pigment and dye-based black inks for punchy photo prints and immaculate document prints, along with an even wider colour space.

In our tests, the extra colour range was most noticeable in blue skies, which had a little more depth to them, and skin tones were impressively rich. This is at the expense of slightly higher running costs, with the addition of the two extra cartridges but, because you're using less of the standard cyan and magenta inks, the difference isn't too noticeable. The MP970 also proved slightly slower than some rivals for photo printing but, even so, it's still amazingly quick.

Multi-talented

More than just a superb printer, the MP970 also includes a class-leading flatbed scanner with a very impressive 4800dpi resolution and even a built-in film adaptor, enabling you to print direct from up to six 35mm negative or positive exposures in a strip, or four mounted slides. Highly intuitive onboard controls and a large 8.8cm colour screen make it equally easy to print direct from memory cards, using the built-in multi-format card reader.

The MP970 is very expensive to buy for an A4 printer and its extra colour space is only slightly noticeable in most prints. This makes it only really worth the money if you need the scanner and other direct print facilities.

HP Photosmart D7460

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The D7460 is the latest in HP's new line of Photosmart printers that feature separate ink tanks for all six colours. The black ink is pigment-based, making the printer well suited to document printing as well as photo output.

The downside is that glossy photos looked slightly uneven in our tests, with pigment black areas appearing less reflective than other colours when using HP's Premium Plus glossy photo paper. However, switching to HP's glossy Advanced Photo Paper, results were better in this respect.

Nice but pricey

With HP's latest generation of Vivera inks under the bonnet, colour rendition is very natural, both for vivid landscapes and subtle skin tones. There's almost nothing to choose between Best and Maximum Resolution print settings, although photo prints at the latter setting take about twice as long to output. Running costs are fairly competitive, although the printer itself is expensive to buy, considering it doesn't have a built-in scanner.

What you do get is a multi-format card reader and a touch-screen colour display for intuitive direct printing, although the finer points of print quality settings are only available when printing from a computer. Another minus point is that the D7460 doesn't support printing onto CDs and DVDs.

Epson Stylus Photo RX585

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On the face of it, the RX585 appears to be based on exactly the same print engine as the Epson R285, but adds all the extras you could wish for, including a multi-format card reader and colour screen for direct printing, as well as a high-quality scanner for photocopying or scanning in existing photo prints.

It's only half the price of some of its rivals but the scanner doesn't have a built-in transparency adaptor and you get five ink colours. The one that's left out is a pigment-based black so, the RX585 won't do a decent job of document printing.

Good colour rendition

Print speeds and running costs were pretty good, the RX585 proved accurate in terms of colour rendition and kept contrast and saturation levels more under control in most cases. Skin tones were still a little cooler than we'd have liked but, overall, the RX585 did manage better quality prints than its siblings.

One annoyance that we ran into was that the RX585 seemed prone to blocked nozzles. After being left for a few days, we'd frequently need to carry out a cleaning cycle to avoid white stripes ruining photo prints. Apart from this setback, the RX585 is a very capable all-in-one printer at the price.