Printers for Every Purpose

General-Purpose Printers (Continued)

Canon i860 Desktop Photo Printer

Canon's i860 uses five inks: cyan, magenta, yellow, and two kinds of black--a photo black for graphics and a pigment-based black mostly for text. The dual blacks pay off: Letters look dark but very clean at big and small type sizes. The i860 holds all five ink tanks at once, and prints fine-looking glossy photos. Gray-scale prints showed sharp detail and realistic shading, and color glossies accurately reproduced colors and textures. The $150 i860 is quick, too: It printed text at 6.8 ppm and color graphics on plain paper at 2.3 ppm.

Canon includes a cartridge for snapshot-size paper, and offers an $80 duplexer option. The i860 forgoes media card slots in favor of a PictBridge port on the front; and the back has USB and parallel ports. On top of everything else, ink costs were low: 8.3 cents per page of color plus black.

Upshot: The i860 generates high-quality prints, but it lacks media card slots.

HP Business Inkjet 2300

The HP Business Inkjet 2300 is tailored for office use, with a paper capacity of 400 sheets and workgroup-oriented options, but it can't keep up with the low-cost color laser printers that it competes with in price.

Its graphics speeds were fairly impressive, but its print quality was less so. The printer tore through graphics at 2.2 ppm--significantly faster than the 1.4-ppm average for this group. Text speed was close to the average, at 5.4 ppm, but about 1.5 ppm slower than the speed of two other general-purpose printers in this roundup.

The 2300 printed blacker, cleaner letterforms than most other inkjets we tested, but comparably priced color lasers we've evaluated produce similar output and print much faster. The 2300 printed our test document of narrow parallel lines better than most inkjets. The 2300's graphics and photos, however, were disappointing.

In our page yield tests, the 2300 turned in the lowest cost per page for black alone (2.1 cents) and for color plus black (7.7 cents).

Upshot: Though HP's Business Inkjet 2300 generates output quickly and is built for high-volume use, its print quality didn't impress us.

HP Deskjet 9650

Priced at $399, the HP Deskjet 9650 has a wide carriage that can handle paper 13 inches across and up to 4 feet long--and its paper-feeding smarts don't stop there. The input tray holds 150 sheets of paper, so you won't have to refill it constantly. A slot in the back draws in heavy stock and feeds it through the printer without bending it.

One inconvenience: You have to swap the 9650's black and photo cartridges, depending on what you're printing. The 9650 has neither a PictBridge port nor memory card slots.

In our page yield tests, printing plain black on the Deskjet 9650 cost a steep 5.1 cents per page (the average cost for general-purpose models in this review was 4.3 cents). For color plus black, this printer was among the most expensive models tested, at 13.8 cents per page.

The 9650 doesn't break any speed records: It printed text at an unimpressive 4.1 ppm, and generated graphics (not photos) at 0.9 ppm, a bit below average for this group. On plain paper, text looked black and clean in headlines but a little choppy in smaller type sizes--a state of affairs that better-quality inkjet paper didn't significantly improve. Color prints on plain paper showed sharp detail and relatively good color. With photo inks on glossy paper, the 9650's prints of gray-scale photos exhibited uncanny depth despite having a somewhat scratchy texture, and color photos came out in sharp focus with realistic colors, though some detail disappeared in shadow areas.

Upshot: The wide-format Deskjet 9650 delivers consistently good print quality on many kinds of documents. This printer is no speed demon, however, and its cost-per-page numbers are quite high.

Lexmark Z816 Color Jetprinter

The $100 z816 printed text pages faster than any other inkjet we've tested recently, at 6.9 ppm. On the other hand, it produced color graphics at a below-average 0.9 ppm; and glossy photos took an unacceptable 6 minutes and 40 seconds each. The Z816's text showed a slight sawtooth pattern along the edges of letters at all type sizes. Color graphics had a somewhat muted, foggy look, but with reasonably attractive detail and lighting. (When we used better-quality inkjet paper, color quality improved a lot, but text quality didn't change much.) Color glossies were the Z816's strong suit, with fine detail, smooth shading, and vibrant colors.

Like its predecessors, the Z816 uses three ink cartridges--containing black, standard three-color, and photo inks--but it holds only two at a time. As a result, you sometimes have to swap cartridges to match your print job. Using Lexmark's standard-capacity cartridges, the Z816 racked up the highest per-page ink costs of any printer we reviewed: 7.7 cents for black alone and a total cost of 15.8 cents for combined black and color. Lexmark's high-capacity cartridges made prints significantly less expensive in the same tests.

Upshot: The Z816 lags behind other printers in output quality and has a steep cost per page, but it prints text fast and the unit itself is inexpensive.