lower-cost ink-jets that range in price from $300 to $400 and higher-priced ones from $600 on up that provide vivid color output.
A whole new animal in the ink-jet market is our best-overall winner, the Hewlett-Packard DeskJet 1600CM ($2479 as tested). It has laser-like performance, and you can network this big ink-jet to give workgroups access to color printing. The Epson Stylus Pro ($799) wins in our print-output quality tests because of its high-definition 720- by 720-dots per inch (dpi) output. And the Canon BJC-4100 and Lexmark Color JetPrinter 2070 tie in the low-cost category.
To evaluate these printers, we ran performance tests that measure how each model prints different kinds of documents--some filled with basic ASCII text and others with complex bit-mapped images. We realize that performance isn't as high a priority when printing graphics-filled pages and color documents, so we included output
quality as part of our tests. We also considered how easy it is to set up and use the printers and checked that they all have the features you'll need.
Stiff Competition
The first ink-jets on the market were monochrome-only printers designed to be affordable but low-end devices for home use only. Since then, faster print speeds and near-typeset-quality output have made ink-jets more competitive with laser printers as office machines.
The one edge that
ink-jets
have over lasers is they make color printing affordable. The first color ink-jets, however, were a hassle to use because you had to swap the black cartridge with a color cartridge to print color documents. Most of today's color ink-jets have dual-cartridge configurations, and they can automatically switch to black ink or color cartridges to fit the requested print job. One caveat: The single multicolor cartridges can run out of ink fast, and they cost about $35 a pop to replace. On average, it costs
between 3 and 5 cents per page to print monochrome text, and color pages can cost between 10 and 40 cents a page.
Even though affordable color-printing capability is the strong suit of ink-jets, speed has always been their Achilles' heel. Lasers are faster, and the ink-jet printers we tested have vendor-specified print speeds of 3 to 10 pages per minute in black-text mode. We discovered that the PC-based printers have an average combined print speed of 1.9 ppm at their standard-resolution setting when processing the ASCII text, bit-mapped images, and various fonts in our test pages. At 4.9 ppm, the HP DeskJet 1600CM is in a class by itself. Color printing, however, generally takes much longer, depending on how many colors are being applied to the print job.
High on Quality
Not everyone is concerned with print speed. If you spend hours in a desktop-publishing application, you want to make sure your output is right on the mark. We find that the printers with the highest print re
solutions are best for black-only text. The maximum monochrome resolutions range from 600 by 300 dpi to 720 by 720 dpi (see the features chart on page 122). In reality, it is hard to tell the difference between resolutions when looking at text on a piece of paper. You should save high-resolution settings for when you're producing newsletters and other documents that have graphics or art.
Printers with the best color quality, like Epson's Stylus Pro, HP's DeskJet 1600CM, Lexmark's Color JetPrinter 2070 ($399), and Apple's StyleWriter 2500 ($379), come closest to producing the realism of a photograph. Color quality doesn't rely on high resolutions as much as it does on the printer drivers and the color management programs provided with the printers.
We tested the printers on vendor-supplied glossy paper; the quality is much better than on plain paper but not up to grade with that of more expensive dye-sublimation printers. The output results of our subjective color-quality test range from tight co
lors to washed-out colors with banding. If you want deeply saturated colors, we recommend that you buy only those printers that have scored highest in our quality ratings.
Two Printers to Go
Canon's BJC-70 ($399) and Apple's StyleWriter 2200 ($419) are portable units. They weigh only about 3 pounds each, but their portability doesn't hinder their performance and quality when compared to some of the bigger desktop units. The BJC-70 offers 720- by 360-dpi high-resolution printing. Its performance is adequate with its vendor-specified 3-ppm print engine when outputting black text in draft mode. You can even print T-shirt transfers on this tiny printer. Apple's Mac-based StyleWriter 2200 has a faster print engine (5 ppm) than that of the BJC-70, and it actually does better than Apple's StyleWriter 2500 ($379) desktop printer in our black-text performance benchmarks. The performance of the StyleWriter 2200, however, flip-flops with that of the StyleWriter 2500 when it comes to high-resolut
ion printing.
Contributors
Jim Kane, Project Manager/NSTL
Dorothy Hudson, Project Manager/NSTL
John McDonough, Technical Writer/NSTL
Maggi Bender, Technical Analyst/NSTL
Susan Colwell, Technical Editor/BYTE
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12 Ink-Jet Printers for Quality Color
