Inkjet Printer Quality Remains High Even as Prices Fall

If you’ve been shopping around for a color inkjet printer lately, you may have noticed that prices are falling. In fact there is now a category of “sub-$100” printers, including the Canon BJC-1000, the Lexmark 1100 and the Hewlett-Packard DeskJet 420c, which, after rebate, cost $89 to $99.

The print quality of these low-end printers is actually quite good but, as you might expect, spending more gives you better and faster printing. Other than the time it takes to print, my only complaint about the low-end printers is that you can insert only one ink cartridge at a time. If you have the black cartridge installed you can’t print color. If the color cartridge is in the printer, any black text or image will be generated by combining color inks to create “composite black.” That is more expensive (because it uses color ink) and less vivid than using black ink.

If you’re willing to spend an additional $50 or so, you’ll get faster printing, slightly better quality and the ability to use both black and color ink at the same time. For $139 to $150, you can get the Hewlett-Packard 697c, Epson 400c, Canon BJC-2000 or Lexmark 3200 that deliver good quality black-and-white prints at about four pages per minute. These printers also do a good job with color photos, but the speed of color printing varies widely depending on the size and complexity of the image.

Epson spends a lot of money advertising its 1,440-dots-per-inch printers and, yes, these printers do produce amazingly good photographs. But you can’t rate printers just by the numbers. The quality of photos printed on the lower resolution printers from HP (600 by 300) and Canon (720 by 360) are also quite good, as are the results from the 1,200-by-1,200 dpi Lexmark 3200.

Many other factors go into the quality of a printed page. The quality of the image itself is, of course, a major factor. Most printers come with software that lets you tweak pictures. Learning how to use that software properly will improve the quality of your prints.

Paper is also very important. Paper designed specifically for color photographs can cost as much as $1 a sheet, so it’s not a trivial purchase. Ink is also expensive, costing as much as 50 cents a page for an 8-by-11-inch printout.

All printer manufacturers also sell paper, which--they all say--is optimized for their printers and inks. This is one of those claims that’s pretty hard to prove. I’ve played with printers from all the major manufacturers and sometimes use one company’s paper in another company’s printer. Frankly, it’s hard to see much difference. I’ve also gotten very good results from a number of third-party brands of paper including glossy inkjet photo paper from Kodak.

As a test, I printed the same image on a Hewlett-Packard 2000 printer using premium glossy photo paper from Hewlett-Packard, Epson and Kodak. Using my wife and two kids as judges in a blind preference test, all three printouts got high ratings, but my son and daughter expressed a slight preference for printouts on Kodak paper. My wife gave a narrow victory to Epson paper. With all three judges, the Hewlett-Packard paper, which was designed for the printer, came in a close third.

We got similar results testing competing paper products on an Epson printer. My family and friends slightly preferred the look of pictures on Kodak and Konica paper to Epson paper.

I don’t claim that these tests are scientific. The results might differ with different printers, different judges and different images, but the bottom line is that the brand of paper doesn’t seem to matter much.

When shopping for paper, check out specialty papers such as Kodak’s perforated glossy paper that lets you print multiple smaller pictures on a single sheet. The paper costs a bit more, but it can be a bargain if you want to print smaller prints.

PaperStudio (https://www.paperstudio.com) has a number of specialty papers for greeting cards, business cards, invitations and other projects, including heart-shaped valentine cards. The PaperStudio Web site lets you download templates for Microsoft Word that help you create amazingly good-looking documents. The paper is perforated, and by using the templates, you can get cards where the image bleeds off of the paper as if they were professionally printed. Even my jaded wife (who generally resents my giving her computer-generated cards) was impressed with the PaperStudio card I had printed for her.

While I sometimes use expensive paper for special projects, I print most of my family photos using cheaper inkjet paper. Here again the brand of paper is of little consequence. What does matter is the paper’s brightness. Many paper companies give their paper a brightness rating ranging from about 82 for cheap copy paper all the way to about 99 for Hewlett-Packard’s Bright White InkJet paper that costs $7.99 per ream (500 sheets). In most cases, brighter paper brings you better contrast and looks better. Again, it’s a subjective matter.

One money-saving trick is to use a moderately priced inkjet paper such as the HP Bright White and, if you want a glossy look, mount the picture in a glass frame or insert it into a photo album with a plastic sleeve. The plastic or glass create the illusion that it’s printed on glossy paper.

For day-to-day text printing I mostly use cheap copy paper and switch to a bright paper when image matters.

Whatever printer or paper you use, be sure that you have the latest printer driver and that you are using it correctly. All printers come with a driver--or software--that actually renders the image. Printer manufacturers frequently update their drivers to fix bugs and improve quality. It’s a good idea to go to the printer maker’s Web site to download the latest driver for your printer.

It’s also important to be sure that you set the printer driver for the type of paper you’re using and the quality of job you want. Most printers have three modes--draft, normal and high quality. As you might expect, the draft mode is faster and, in some cases, uses less ink than normal or high quality. For day-to-day text printing, I use the draft mode. It’s not as crisp as the normal mode, but it’s good enough. When I print a letter to a colleague, I generally select normal. I only use high quality when I’m printing photos or illustrations.

My only problem with all these great printers and special papers is that I don’t get to use them that often. These days, most of my letters go out as e-mail and, thanks to greeting card Web sites such as BlueMountain.com, even printed greeting cards are an endangered species.

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Lawrence J. Magid can be reached at larry.magid@latimes.com. His Web page is at https://www.larrysworld.com or keyword “LarryMagid” on AOL.