Photo Printers: The Price of Great Pictures

In Search of Top-Notch Snaps

Though six of the seven full-size photo printers earned our top score for their glossy photos printed on letter-size paper, not all of those models printed equally impressive snapshots.

The Canon Pixma IP4000R and the HP Photosmart 8150 both printed 4-by-6-inch photos that showed banding near the trailing edge, which may be due to problems feeding the smaller paper. Some textures in the IP4000R's snapshot didn't look as smooth as they did on larger paper. Details in the 8150's 4-by-6-inch print looked oversharpened--edges appeared jagged.

None of the snapshot printers earned an Outstanding for their snapshots, though four of the full-size printers did.

Other considerations for the finicky: Using borderless settings doesn't guarantee a borderless print. Even though our image measured exactly 4 by 6 inches, and we selected a borderless print in the print driver, the Sony DPP-EX50 left a narrow white strip along two edges of its prints; similarly, the Dell 540 didn't print to the top edge of its paper. Dye-subs weren't the only models to have sizing problems: Both the HP 8450 and the Epson R320 trimmed about an eighth of an inch from at least one edge of our image in their borderless prints.

Eric Butterfield