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printers produce better quality photos than traditional silver halide, one of the reasons digital photography has superseded it.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 The Selphy CP780 is a tiny personal photo printer for producing lab-quality 6 x 4in prints. At just 176 x 132 x 75mm it can sit unobtrusively on a shelf or at the back of a drawer, ready to be brought out quickly for those occasions when you want an ad-hoc hardcopy of a photo you have taken with your digital Camera.
Canon’s Selphy CP780
Canon has resisted the urge to make the device cute at the expense of functionality, so it remains relatively plain, compact and rectangular. We tested the silver version; the white version would have been plainer still. If you want cuteness, buy the pink or blue versions.
Unfortunately, the impression of compact tidiness is destroyed when you plug in the power cable at the back and a USB cable at the side, leaving cables trailing in two directions across the table. Putting the two inputs together would have made the device appear classier.
A plastic paper cassette slots into the front of the unit, with a hinged flap on top acting as the output tray. The cassette is designed to hold any of a range of Canon-branded media including 6 x 4in photo cards, 100 x 200mm wide-format photo cards, and various sizes of stickers. Read the rest of this entry »
