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INKJET PRINTERS
A good color inkjet printer can be bought for $200 or less. To get your money's worth, though, you should step back and evaluate the real costs. To help you, Presentations reviewed four inkjet printers: Canon's S630 Color Bubble Jet, Epson's Stylus C80, Hewlett-Packard's Photosmart 1115 and Lexmark's Z53 Color Jetprinter.
What makes a good printer? Features such as sharp text, photo-quality pictures and fast printing come immediately to mind. But buyers should also be aware of a printer's ink formula, its physical stature on the desktop and how much it costs to operate as well as extras such as storage-card readers and digital-imaging software. Even the best inkjet printers don't cost much in comparison with their laser-printer cousins, so these features and capabilities are more important than ever.
Four for your consideration
This review looks at four inkjet printers ranging in price from S140 to S200. All do an admirable job with text and images. All are easy to operate and can be set up and printing in minutes. Other similarities include USB and parallel-port support, high resolution (2,400 x 1,200-dpi and higher), compatibility with both Macintosh and Windows systems, and one-year warranties.
After printing full-page photos, grainy Web sites and Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, we've judged each printer on a variety of merits and challenged each company's advertised specifications. In the end, you can't go entirely wrong with any of these printers; they all work great for everyday tasks. But if you need a specific function for example, archivable photographs or fast, razor-sharp text - keep reading to see which printer delivers the specific characteristics you want.
Hewlett-Packard Photosmart 1115
As the only dedicated photo printer in this review, the Hewlett-Packard Photosmart 1115 has an unfair advantage. Not only is the unit tweaked
especially for digital images, but it also comes with such niceties as flash-media slots and photo-- editing software. Unsurprisingly, the Photosmart 1115 produced images that were a notch above those from the Canon S630 and significantly better than those from the Epson C80 and Lexmark Z53.
As an all-around office printer, however, the Photosmart 1115 is not perfect. Its text was not as sharp as any of the other printers' and it was the slowest at producing...