Content area
Full Text
If you can get a good photo-inkjet printer for $99, why pay more ? There are some good reasons.
ake a new photo-inkjet printer, add top-quality photo paper and send a high-res image its way. Nowadays, the result will likely be a breathtaking photo that rivals a print from a professional lab. The latest photo inkjets are that good.
Recent improvements in inkjet printing technology are nothing short of amazing, and these advancements are even more evident in the niche category of photo-inkjet printers. After trying to get it right for more than a decade, through dozens of product generations, the Epsons and Canons of the world have nearly perfected photo-inkjet printer design. For most people, the nitty-gritty specs - the picoliter drop sizes and page-perminute speeds - have become all but irrelevant. Every printer manufacturer sells models that will print both photos and text amazingly well for the average business or home user. And some of these printers can be had for as little as $99. So why spend more than that on a photo-inkjet printer? That was our question when we set out to review four new models of varying prices. At $99, the Lexmark Z55se is the best buy of the group; the Canon S9000 is the most expensive at $500. In between, we looked at the $349 Epson Stylus Photo 960 and the 5299 Hewlett-Packard Photosmart 7550.
Our conclusion? There are obvious advantages to the pricier printers, but each model held its own. Picture quality, in fact, was not vastly different from one model to another. The advantages of the higher-price models were their extra features - borderless printing, roll-paper capacities, digital-camera-card readers, individual ink cartridges, ink longevity, better bundled software, and printer designs that seemed sturdier and more durable. Lexmark Z55se Color Jetprinter This is a no-frills photo printer. It produces goodlooking photos, but has none of the extras sported by some of the pricier models tested in this review, such as borderless printing, memory-card readers and separate color-ink cartridges.
The Lexmark Z55se does have a printing resolution of 4,800 x 1,200 dots per inch (dpi), which produces images that compare favorably with prints from the other models in this roundup. Granted, the photo prints weren't quite as rich...