Issue #0709/1 - Taking the focus off office printing, this week we turn the microscope onto the photo print performance and image quality of our inkjet All-in-One machines.
Print speed or image quality, first impressions can be deceiving – the highlights help point the way.
Photo print speed presents itself as something of a conundrum. On the one hand we have been happy, or even are still happy, to send our films away to a processing lab and wait several days before having the prints in our hands – even for reprints or digital prints from an internet print service – but, on the other hand, we live in the kind of instant world where we want everything right now and waiting a few minutes for a photo causes huge frustration.
While inkjet photo printers have become much faster over the years since printing photos was a viable option, the length of time we have to wait while the image prints varies immensely. For instance, among just the four printers tested here, a borderless full-page (A4) image can print in as little as 4 minutes and 22 seconds, while the same image can take almost 17 minutes to print.
What we have to ask ourselves is, ‘is this a problem’?
We should come up with the answer, ‘No’!, or at least ’No, not necessarily’! However, that is not always the case and we may be tempted to choose the faster printer simply because it means not having to wait so long.
But, have we taken into account the print quality achievable from each printer? It is for this reason that last week’s TCPglobal considered both print speed and print quality when printing office documents. For the same reason, this week we consider the issues of print speed and image quality when printing photographs.
In the final analysis, we must also consider the cost of Printing, both for office printing and for photo printing, so next week we will attempt to tie it all together and to draw some sensible and realistic conclusions.
In this pair of articles, as indicated, we find that there are significant differences in print times but also that there are significant differences in print quality. Put these two elements together with the difference in print costs that we discovered in Issue #0706 "Inkjet All-in-One lab tests – Cost of Photo Printing", and we come up with what might appear to be some surprising recommendations for choice of printer.
Highlights
- Hewlett-Packard’s Photosmart C4180 proved to be the fastest in printing photographs by a small margin but image quality was unexciting
- Slow photo printing is more likely to result in high quality prints:
- Brother’s DCP-330C may have been slowest but was voted most accurate in psychometric testing
- Lexmark’s printer is both appalling and unattractive in almost every aspect but, received the highest overall rating for print quality in psychometric testing
- Strength of feeling ran very high with image quality for Brother DCP-330C and Epson Stylus Photo RX620
- Brother DCP-330C was ranked ‘most pleasing’ by 42% of respondents but was ranked ‘least pleasing’ by a further 42% of respondents
- Images from the Lexmark P4350 were rated ‘best overall’, with a 72% score
- Lexmark P4350 was not ranked ‘least pleasing’ by any participants
- 48% of respondents ranked Brother DCP-330C as producing the images with the ‘most natural’ colours
- Epson Stylus Photo RX620 ranked ‘least pleasing’ set of photos by 45% of respondents
~End~
