Photo Quality Arrives for Low-Cost Printers

Jon Pepper

Ink-jet printers were once the poor substitute for people who couldn't afford a laser printer. Now, these inexpensive devices are delivering much that laser printers can't, including near-photorealistic images at a fraction of the price.

Improvements in ink formulations, dot-placement accuracy, and better software are all combining to produce the best-looking color ink-jet output yet for personal d esktops. And the prices are coming down to staggeringly low levels for this type of output.

An excellent example is Epson's Stylus Color 500C, which puts the company's 720- by 720-dots-per-inch (dpi) output technology in a printer expected to sell for about $279. The 500C produces sharp blac k text, but the real attraction is the photo-quality output. Samples printed on coated stock were as close to conventional photographs as we've seen from a color ink jet, regardless of price. The Epson prints black text at up to 4 pages per minute (ppm) and color at about 1 ppm or slower.

Hewlett-Packard is countering with its midrange model, the 693C. This printer produces laudable photo-quality output in its basic mode, but HP has added an optional ($49) photo cartridge for even higher-quality output. Inserting the photo cartridge in place of the black ink cartridge produces a much wider range of possible colors, resulting in smoother and better looking output. The results we saw were very impressive, making the HP competitive with the Epson, though it is somewhat more expensive ($349) and does not come ready to work with a Mac.

Canon's latest iteration of its BubbleJet technology is the BJC-4200, which prints at 720 dpi for crisp, lifelike images. Canon offers specialty neon inks for the BJC-4200, though it has no photo-specific inks like HP. List price is $399. Canon's BJC-240, also new, sells for $179, but it's slower than the BJC-4200: 4 ppm in black and white and way under 1 ppm in color

Lexmark's latest, the Color Jetprinter 2050 ($299), prints black or four-color output at 600-dpi resolution. The company rates its speed as up to 5 ppm in black and 2 ppm in color. Lexmark offers an accompanying line of special paper for high-quality photographic reproduction.

These color ink jets aren't perfect. They are slower than laser printers when it comes to high-volume black-and-white output, and they can be very slow when producing photo-quality color pages (as much as 3 minutes or more a page). Still, at these prices, they make color printing very affordable.

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Color Ink-Jet Printers

                              Text   Color   Resolution  Cost  Photo 
                              Speed  Speed                     Color

Epson Stylus Color 500
        4 ppm  2 ppm    720 x 720  $279   Yes
Canon BJC-4200                5 ppm  1 ppm    720 x 360  $299   Yes
HP DeskJet 693C               3 ppm  1 ppm    600 x 600  $349   Yes
LexMark Color                 5 ppm  2 ppm    600 x 600  $299   Yes
 JetPrinter 2050


Note:
 HP and Canon require optional cartridges for true 
      photo color output.