Fighting It Out On Photo Quality

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday March 28, 1998

DARREN YATES

Your happy snaps can now be reproduced in their original glory, writes DARREN YATES.

Nothing makes a printer look old faster than trying to get it to print out your favourite photos. Even if the printer is little more than a year old, chances are you're going to see images that don't do the original justice.

Printer manufacturers have had to jump plenty of hurdles improving performance. First, it was that horrible banding in the early models that made printouts look as if they had been crafted from strips of paper. Then there was reducing the size of the ink dots - getting the resolution high enough so that an ink dot didn't look a blob. Now it's trying to increase the number of colours.

In search of

photo quality

Competition in printers is fierce, with the top four - Hewlett-Packard, Canon, Epson and Lexmark - constantly trying to outdo each other, at the low-cost home end of the market and in the rarefied air of photo-quality printers.

Each vendor has one printer that I would put in the photo-quality category: Canon's new BJC-7000, Hewlett-Packard's Photo Printer, Epson's Stylus Photo and Lexmark's JetPrinter 7200. Epson and Hewlett-Packard have come up with designs that are meant purely for photo images. While they could be used for the odd business letter, the performance is not the best.

Canon and Lexmark have gone in the other direction with an all-round design that can handle high-resolution images and your average business letter equally well. However, they take longer to print photo images.

Original inkjet printers had a resolution of 300 x 300 dots per inch (300dpi) while today's models are up to 1200 x 1200dpi.

Multicolour

printing

One big improvement has been the arrival of six-colour printing - in fact, the Canon BJC-7000 prints with seven colours. The idea of more colours is pretty basic - the more you have to choose from, the more accu-rately the printer can match the original image. Canon has a unique system whereby it can vary the size of the dot and deliver what appears to be multiple shades of the one colour - a cheaper and just as effective method. The BJC-7000 can deliver up to 729 different colours through multi-shading and colouring.

All of these printers, except the HP PhotoSmart Photo Printer, work with Windows 3.1. The Hewlett-Packard unit requires at least a 486 PC and Windows 95.

Epson Stylus Photo

This is the oldest and has a top resolution of 720 x 720dpi on plain or glossy paper. It prints with six colours to give a very good-looking photo image. This is the only one that comes with IBM and Apple connections and software. It has great driver software that tells you how much ink is left, so you don't get stuck halfway through a job. The Stylus Photo also has good speed - I tested it using a 9Mb Photoshop file and it came through in three minutes on plain paper. Epson has bundled it with LivePix, an easy-to-use photo editing software package.

Street price: About $580.

Hewlett-Packard PhotoSmart Photo Printer

The largest of the four, this is almost the size of a desktop computer case, and stores its paper internally. HP won't say what the resolution is, but its output on photo paper is impressive. This is another six-colour printer, using the same colours as the Epson model. Unlike other Hewlett-Packard printers, the Photo Printer has a straight paper path; that is, it doesn't bend the paper, which makes it suitable for high-quality, thick photo-graphic paper. It comes with Microsoft's PictureIt photo-editing software. Our test file took just over three minutes to print. Its quality on plain paper was OK but the colours looked a little dark. Using HP's photo paper, the results were excellent.

Street price: About $870.

Canon BJC-7000

This does a better job on plain paper thanks to a coating system called P-Pop that uses a bonding agent to make sure the ink stays where it is dropped rather than get soaked up by the paper. It uses seven colours and can give multiple shading. Top resolution is 1200 x 600dpi, but our photo test file took more than 10 minutes to print. The quality was very good on photo paper, but on plain paper some colours were quite stark. Alone of the four, it can switch from photo to fast text without the need to change a cartridge.

Street price: About $620.

Lexmark JetPrinter 7200

This was the noisiest and felt a fragile compared with the metal chassis of the HP model. However, it prints at up to 1200 x 1200dpi on photo paper - and you won't find anything higher at the moment. This is a versatile model, able to print six-colour photo images or fast black text if you change cartridges. It took six minutes on our Photoshop image test, and did quite a good job. Colours on plain and photo paper looked great, and the extra resolution gave it a better look on plain paper. It comes with good driver software that tells you how much ink is left.

Street price: About $560.

My Pick

Each of the four has its pluses and minuses, but I'd probably lean towards the Hewlett-Packard for the best quality and sturdy construction, although at nearly $900 the price could be a deterrent. For smaller budgets, I'd look at the Epson Stylus Photo or the CanonBJC-7000. For more of an all-rounder, Lexmark's 7200 Jet-Printer is neither pretty nor quiet, but at 1200dpi even plain paper printing has a certain sharpness about it. And at about $560, it's also the cheapest of the four. Overall, these are the four best photographic printers on the market.