The Cutting Edge: Computing / Technology / Innovation : The Newest Color Ink-Jet Printers Catch Up With Color Computing
Color printing has finally caught up with color computing. You can print exciting-looking documents with colorful logos, graphs and photos on any of four modestly priced color ink-jet printers for Windows or Macintosh computers.
The best of the bunch, Epson America Inc’s. brand-new Stylus Color Printer, is not only capable of a stunning 720-dots-per-inch resolution on special paper, it can turn out a full-color, full-page photo in less time than its Hewlett-Packard competitor can print the same image at 300 dots per inch. And in its 360-dots-per-inch mode, the Epson is more than three times faster than the H-P printer. For a full-page color photo, that is the difference between five minutes and 18 minutes.
Still, excellent print quality--and more robust construction--is available from H-P’s DeskJet 560C color ink-jet printer and Apple Computer’s Color StyleWriter Pro. Canon Computer Systems’ BJC-600 color ink-jet printer, which I haven’t tested, is essentially the same as the Apple Color StyleWriter Pro and can be expected to deliver similar performance. (Although the only Macintosh color printer I tested was Apple’s, that is not your only choice. The Hewlett-Packard DeskWriter 560C is configured for the Macintosh. A Macintosh version of Epson’s printer is due out this fall.)
You won’t find much difference in price among the H-P, Apple and Canon printers and, depending on where you shop, all can be bought for less than $650. Street prices of the new Epson should be similar. If you mainly print color graphics such as charts, graphs, logos and the like, rather than color photos, you’ll probably not see much difference among any of them.
Unlike some earlier color ink-jet printers, such as H-P’s DeskJet 500C, all of these printers have four colors of ink: black and the three printing process colors of cyan (blue), magenta and yellow. That assures that you can print true black plus virtually any other color in the spectrum. (The DeskJet 500C, lacking black ink, simulates black by adding equal amounts of the three process colors, which creates a greenish black and uses three times as much ink.)
A significant advantage offered by the Apple and Canon printers is a separate ink cartridge for each color. You replace only the color that runs out. Both the HP and Epson printers have a separate black ink cartridge, but the three process colors share the second cartridge. When one color runs dry, you pay to replace all three.
Many people will find these printers adequate substitutes for laser printer when printing black-only documents. They are a little slower than most laser printers, but it is hard to see any difference in print quality. The Hewlett-Packard printers have an edge in black-only printing because they have a higher resolution in black of 600 by 300 dots per inch. Color resolution is limited to 300 dots per inch vertically and horizontally.
One characteristic that all of these new printers share is the much greater sophistication of software control they bring to the printing process, compared to earlier color ink-jet printers. Whether in Windows or on the Macintosh, the printer “driver” software that comes with these printers enables you to fine-tune the printer’s behavior according to what kind of file is being printed.
Hewlett-Packard’s Windows printer driver has something called ColorSmart that can automatically alter the way various sections of a page are printed according to the kind of data being printed. A color photo gets one kind of setting to emphasize detail, while a simple color graph gets another treatment to make the colors rich and smooth.
The Epson Windows driver has a special “microweave” setting, which you must invoke manually. It intersperses the ink droplets with two passes of the print head to eliminate unwanted patterns of print head movement, called banding. But highest-resolution prints were marred slightly because the first quarter-inch of the image received only one pass of the print head and the color was noticeably lighter than the rest of the print.
The other weakness of Epson’s printer is a flimsy paper tray. The upper tray, which holds paper after it is printed, looks especially fragile. I couldn’t actually break it, however. It is so flexible that it deforms easily without breaking, then snaps back into shape when pressure is released. Maybe that’s the idea. But there is nothing flimsy-looking about the Hewlett-Packard or Apple and Canon printers.
Although all of these printers will produce good results on plain paper, it takes special paper to get the best out of them. And it takes different special paper for all three.
Epson has two different coated papers with flat finishes, one for 360-dot-per-inch work and the other for 720 dots per inch.
H-P has a semi-glossy plasticized paper for its highest-quality work and it looks very good. But that same paper is too slick to feed properly in the Epson printer and produces washed-out images when it does go through.
The fanciest paper is Apple’s backprint film, which produces a truly astounding glossy print that is hard to distinguish from a photograph. It does so by reversing the image (the printer driver does this automatically when you select backprint film in its dialogue box) and printing it on the dull, translucent backside of the film. You then view the image through the shiny front side and marvel at the results.
Bear in mind that getting the best out of any of these printers requires high-quality, 24-bit color image files, which in turn require large disk storage and high-performance photo manipulation software.
On the other hand, it is easy to get brilliant color into documents with ordinary spreadsheet graphs, scanned or clip-art logos and drawings, and by simply assigning colors to titles or headlines in word-processing files.
