Product Round-up There’s only really one choice of technology for Printing photos well and economically. Inkjet printers produce better quality photos than traditional silver halide, one of the reasons digital photography has superseded it.
Most of the major printer manufacturers produce inkjet printers and even the most basic of these can print good photos. When you’re buying a new printer, though, you usually want it to be able to print plain paper pages, too. These ten printers can do both and most can handle copying and scanning. There’s something to suit all budgets, with top of class performance from most.
1. Brother DCP-J125
All Brother’s SOHO machines look similar; neat and with a small footprint, more like an old fax machine than a modern all-in-one. This entry-level photo inkjet still includes memory card slots and a colour LCD, though not the wide-screen display which is a hallmark of Brother’s dearer models. It prints photos slowly, taking around three minutes for a 15 x 10cm print, under test. Print quality is fair on lighter shades, with natural colour rendition but, as with many inexpensive inkjets, dark hues can be murky and merge into each other. There’s a third off the RRP, if you shop around.
Review Mid-range, inkjet all-in-ones are the mainstay of most printer makers’ catalogues, so for one to stand out, it has to offer extra features, better performance or improved cost of ownership to get noticed. Canon has introduced the Pixma MP560 to build on a successful design in at least two of these three ways.
Canon’s Pixma MP560: the changes are more than cosmetic
There are many instances when a new printer model is nothing but a replacement for one that’s gone before, often with more minor cosmetic changes than between this year’s and last year’s Ford Fiesta. However, that’s not the case with the Pixma MP560. It may appear like the MP540, but actually has a lot more going for it.
Indeed, it looks much like Canon’s recent run of all-in-ones, coloured in silver and high-gloss black plastic, but the concave sides are less pronounced and it’s a little squatter than its predecessor. At the back, a flap folds up and lifts to become a 150-sheet paper tray for photo sheets, though it can be used for special media, like letterheads, too. Read the rest of this entry »
Review Product design has clearly moved on leaps and bounds since the early days of popular multifunctional devices (MFDs), judging by the Brother DCP-375CW. Not only does it look rather swanky in its dual-finish matt and shiny black casing, but it is extraordinarily compact at just 150mm high, 390mm wide and 360mm deep. How Brother managed to cram a full A4 scanner in there is still a mystery.
Brother’s DCP-375CW: certainly stylish, but watch out for finger marks on that shiny plastic
The scanning plate is hidden under the curved top of the unit, the lid fitting flush with the rest of the plastic case. If you didn’t know the scanner was there, you would think the DCP-375CW was just a printer. The lid itself rises, rather than just hinges open, thereby allowing you to scan thick originals while keeping the lid flat. The active scanning area is 297 x 215.9mm, minus 3mm on all edges, which you may conclude is an acceptable sacrifice: it caused us no practical problems, anyway.
Towards the front of the scanner lid is the main control pad. This principally comprise a set of copy buttons that control functions such as resizing, quality and quantity, along with Colour and Mono options and clearly labelled Stop button. Read the rest of this entry »
Review It is to Brother’s great credit that the all-in-one MFC-6890CDW packs in as many wishlist features as reasonably possible without hitting buyers with an unfriendly price. This combined A3 colour inkjet printer and A3 scanner with a full-size glass plate is a big unit at 540 x 488 x 323mm, but not particularly heavy at 15.6kg. You asked for A3, so live with it.
Brother’s MFC-6890CDW
As standard, the MFC-6890CDW is fitted with an automatic sheet feeder, dedicated fax functions, automatic duplex (two-sided) Printing, a choice of Camera card slots, and 10/100 Ethernet and 802.11b/g Wi-Fi connections. And, as we found out, both the print quality and scan quality are excellent – far better than you would normally expect from an MFD. Read the rest of this entry »
Review The main problem with shoehorning inkjet printers and all-in-ones into the office environment is the time it takes for the ink to dry. Faster drying ink means higher print speeds, so Ricoh’s Gelsprinter technology that utilises gel-based inks, is designed to offer high-speed documents, with the benefits of the large colour gamut of liquid ink.
High and dry: Ricoh’s Aficio GX 3000S
Ricoh’s Gelsprinters made a rather stuttering launch onto the inkjet printer scene, as they required a firmware update soon after launch, which held back the first production samples. Now more established, Ricoh is still not the first company you think of when considering an inkjet all-in-one. The Aficio GX 3000S is a full multi-function printer, offering scanning and copying, as well as print, but without fax or photo print functions.
You could be forgiven for thinking this is a laser-based machine, since it has a large footprint and is much higher off the desk than even other office-oriented inkjets. Although it has with a substantial inkjet printhead to move across the platen, it still seems unnecessarily tall. Read the rest of this entry »
