THE CUTTING EDGE: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : A Wide Spectrum of Color Printers

For all the attention that’s lately been lavished upon Pentium computers and Windows 95 software and the glories of on-line communications, some of the most important and dramatic advances in computer technology in recent years have involved the lowly printer.

Advanced laser printers that were once the province of corporations can now be purchased for little more than $500 and thus are a practical option for many consumers and small businesses. Even more exciting, color printing has become so cheap and high-quality that there’s little excuse for continuing to bore people with black and white. You can add a splash of pizazz for as little as $230 or spend more than $1,000 on new models from Hewlett-Packard, Canon, Epson or Lexmark.

Any of the color ink-jet printers will give you nearly the same quality of black and white printing as a laser printer (you can see the difference with a magnifying glass). They do, however, tend to be slower: when printing in color, output tends to be measured in minutes per page rather than the pages per minute. And because ink-jets require higher-quality paper and the cartridges need to be replaced more often than laser toner cartridges, the cost per page rises as soon as you add color.

Choosing the best color printer for your needs is surprisingly complex, and unfortunately the technical specifications published by the manufacturers don’t tell you everything you need to know.

The most important distinction between the lowest-priced color ink-jets and those suitable for office use is the simultaneous presence of both black and color ink cartridges. The low-end models require you to switch between black and color cartridges, meaning that when the black cartridge is in place, you can’t have any color, and when the color cartridge is in place, you can’t get true black. (Instead, what you get for black will probably have a greenish tinge to it.) But they are cheap: Hewlett-Packard, Canon and Epson have competing models in the $230-$300 range.

If your printing needs aren’t too heavy, one of the two-cartridge (black and color) mid-range models are probably the best choice. They include the HP DeskJet 660C, about $400; Epson’s Stylus Color II, about $450; Canon’s forthcoming BJC 4100, about $370, and Lexmark’s Winwriter 150C, about $350. All are optimized for black text printing, although they do great color, too.

Moving up the line, you’ll find printers that are better for high-resolution color printing or faster text printing. At the lower end of this spectrum is Canon’s new BJC610, at about $550. At the same price you’ll also find HP’s DeskJet 850C, which Hewlett-Packard is targeting as a business printer. It is optimized for text printing, with speeds four to six times faster than the DeskJet 660C, and color printing speed is about three times faster than the 660C.

Epson’s Color Stylus Pro, about $800, offers a printing dot 25% smaller than the Color Stylus II, yielding better color quality on a wider variety of paper than its less-expensive sibling. But it actually prints slightly more slowly to achieve that performance. It prints up to legal size paper, as do all of the other printers listed here.

If you need 11-by-17-inch images with ink from edge to edge, the Color Stylus Pro XL, about $1,800, is available. You can turn it into a true network printer with its own Ethernet connection and add Postscript capability as well. Also in this class is Hewlett-Packard’s new DeskJet 1600C, about $1,400, which is designed for heavy office printing demands and can also be equipped with Adobe Postscript for an extra $600.

The DeskJet 1600C also has separate cartridges for each color, reducing color costs. At possible color ink savings of 10 or 15 cents a page for heavy graphics printing, you don’t have to put very many reams of paper through either the HP or the Canon BJC610 (which also has separate cartridges) to make up their extra purchase cost. Lexmark, which is the spin-off company from IBM’s old typewriter and dot-matrix printer days, also has a high-end color ink-jet Postscript printer, the 4079C, for under $3,000.

I haven’t been able to test all of these printers. But I did get a look at the Lexmark Winwriter 150C, the Epson Color Stylus Pro and the HP DeskJet 850C.

The Lexmark was a dandy home office printer with snappy performance and excellent print quality, as long as I limited color printing to its lower resolution of 300-by-300 dots-per-inch. If I boosted it up to 600-by-300 dots-per-inch, which its printer driver allowed, I got flawed photo reproductions because the printer sometimes created partial lines of erroneous dots as it tried to pump up the resolution.

Comparing the Epson Color Stylus Pro and the HP DeskJet 850C yielded contrasting results. The Epson printed color photos much faster and with noticeably better quality than the HP. But the HP printed black text significantly faster than the Epson and it looked better too. (The HP’s color quality may have been hampered because I had to use a generic HP printer driver for Windows 95 instead of a model-specific driver. That free piece of software won’t be available from Hewlett-Packard for another month or so.)

If you added color graphics into the equation, like bar charts embedded in a spreadsheet or just colored type and title backgrounds, the HP’s speed advantage was even greater, but I liked the Epson’s color reproduction better.

The most important lesson from my testing was that the quality of the paper you use makes a big difference: You can only get rich, vibrant colors on special glossy papers and films that cost more than 70 cents per sheet.

At those prices, I soon realized that no matter how much fun I was having reproducing full-page color photos from my summer vacation, I’d be able to do it cheaper, much faster and with higher quality by simply having a color photo enlargement copied on a color copier.

Time can be a serious factor. At 360-by-360 dpi resolution, the Epson printed a full-page photo in nine minutes. But by setting the resolution to 720-by-720 dpi, which yields better quality, it took 22 minutes on a 486/50 computer equipped with Windows 95. The HP DeskJet 850C took a whopping 27 minutes to print the same photo at its highest “presentation” resolution of 600-by-600 dpi.

Printing full-page photos may not be the right chore to give to a color ink-jet printer, but printing overhead transparencies for presentations certainly is a good use. Just be aware that the more complex and colorful the transparency, the longer it’ll take to print; don’t wait until the last minute to make those slides or you literally could stay up all night to finish.

Color shouldn’t all be work, however, and no manufacturer understands that better than Canon with its emphasis on fun things to do.

All of the new Canon printers will come with the “Canon Creative” CD-ROM with five color printing applications. “Hallmark Connections Everyday Greetings” gives you a choice of 150 greeting card designs. “Crayola Art” is a kid’s coloring book on computer. “Stationery Store” and “Sticker & Label Store” let you create decorative personalized stationery and stickers out of standard label stock. “Pattern Maker” has its own cross-stitch templates and can translate imported photos into cross-stitch patterns and print them on special cotton fabric sheets.

Canon also offers T-shirt transfer paper. The printer driver will automatically reverse any image you print on that paper so that it will appear properly when ironed onto a T-shirt. Who knows, maybe there’s a little cottage business for you in all this too.