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printers produce better quality photos than traditional silver halide, one of the reasons digital photography has superseded it.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 If you’re running a large workgroup, you need a printer that is fast, cheap to run and has enough flexibility to handle a variety of media and to grow with the tasks it’s asked to perform. Endeavouring to address all these needs, while also offering colour, duplex and walk-up direct print, is Lexmark’s C736dn.
For a large workgroup laser, Lexmark’s C736dn is surprisingly discreet. It has a smaller Desktop footprint than many, because its colour laser engine is vertically mounted, with each of the four, colour drum and toner combinations placed one above the other. It also has a main paper tray, which can take 550 sheets of office paper at a time, lifting it still further off the Desktop. A pull-down, multipurpose tray offers space for 100 sheets of special media.
Yet this is just the start of the printer‘s paper handling capabilities. You can add three more 550-sheet trays and a 2,000-sheet motorised bin, giving a total expanded capacity of 4,300 sheets, with plenty of flexibility for letterheads and follow-on sheets, as well as plain pages. Oddly, there are no equivalent expansion options for output, such as stackers, collators or staplers.
The printer‘s two-tone grey case isn’t particularly photogenic, but should fit in most modern offices, without glaring. Paper feeds out from front to back and a single, flip-up paper stop at the rear is all that’s needed to capture printed jobs. The control panel is functional and well laid out, with a four-line by 16-character, backlit LCD display also capable of full bitmap display, which is used to good effect by Lexmark in displaying help messages diagrammatically, for tasks such as correcting paper jams. Read the rest of this entry »
Review First a confession: we have always been troubled by the concept of black-and-white multifunctional devices (MFDs). Being able to scan in colour but print only in mono seems rather like being given a punnet of strawberries that you are only allowed to smell. However, Oki clearly feels there continues to be demand for this level of product and, given the company’s long history in the MFD market, we were willing to be won over by its new MB290.
Oki’s MB290: mono Printing keeps it compact compared to colour equivalents
It is, after all, a proper MFD that provides extensive multi-user fax features in addition to scanning, 20ppm LED Printing and copying. It also has a network port for workgroup use, a built-in web-based management utility and an automatic document feeder (ADF) as standard. Even without the luxury of colour Printing, that’s not bad for £210. Despite the large overall dimensions of 412x447x386mm, the MB290 is a compact device with a relatively small footprint and weighing just 13kg.
A single 250-sheet paper cassette is loaded into the front at the base of the unit. Although the front of the cassette sits flush with the front of the machine, the rear end of the cassette sticks out a few centimetres at the back – uncovered and steadily collecting dust. There is no paper level indicator. Above the paper cassette is a single-sheet manual feeder slot with smooth-sliding width guides. Envelopes pass through unfettered and without wrinkling. Read the rest of this entry »
