Inkjet Printers

Does the printer lineup in this year's inkjet comparison call up a bit of déjà vu? It certainly did with us. Admittedly only a couple of the printers present are models that we tested in our roundup last year, but most of the remaining printers tested are evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

What has improved (and quite significantly) is the speed and quality of the output that your dollar buys. The four criteria we previously defined, which included portables as one of the categories, have been expanded. We looked at the products shipped to us and realised that there is a distinct sub-AU$200 category hotting up. As a consequence we decided to tweak the price points and came up with the following categories: sub-AU$200, AU$200 to AU$350, AU$350 to AU$500, and over AU$500.

And, as we have seen in the past, a simple rule of thumb is, the price goes up as the speed and/or output quality increases. A total of 17 printers were submitted from vendors such as Brother, Canon, Epson, HP and Lexmark. We attempted to run cartridge life tests on all the provided printers in both black and colour. However, a couple of the printers either did not ship with a second set of cartridges for the tests, or the second set of cartridges arrived too late for testing.

The testing procedure was pretty simple, set up the printer driver, run the cartridges dry and then calculate the number of 5 percent black and 15 percent colour pages they could produce, then divide this by the cartridge costs to arrive at a cost per page of ink!

We should also note that in most cases the printers do not ship with a printer cable. If you intend to purchase your very first printer be aware you will have to fork out a few dollars for the cable as well.

One interesting side note: if you are using the printer in a quiet environment where any extraneous noise is frowned upon, the HP printers are easily the quietest of the group. It's not necessarily the print head tearing back and forth that results in the other printers being noisier, it's the paper feed motors and gears that appear to produce the most noise, and HP have subdued this noise admirably.

Canon BJC-2100SP

Editors' Choice

The next step up the evolutionary ladder after Canon's BJC-2100SP (tested last year) is the BJC-2100SP. At first glance, not a great deal has changed: the AC power supply is integrated, it takes identical ink cartridges and a scanner head can be installed in place of the print head to enable 360dpi scanning of documents and the likeâ€"bearing in mind of course that the item scanned must follow a lazy -L"-shaped path in common with the other Canon printers tested.

Resolution has not changed, staying at 720 x 360dpi for both black and colour but, in addition to the parallel port, the printer now sports a standard USB port as well. Even with this inclusion, the price has still managed to drop $10 when compared to the superseded model. The printer is quite small and light but not at all flimsy, we were surprised at just how robust it was.

The only button on the top of the printer has multiple personalitiesâ€"depending on the printer status and how long you hold the button, it functions as page feed, resume, print nozzle check pattern, and print head cleaning.

The User's Manual is extraordinarily detailed, more so than Canon's new range of more expensive printers, running to 240 pages that covers every aspect of the printer and its drivers. But that is not the end of the story: given the printers target market Canon has included three large fold-out -Getting Started" sheetsâ€"each a different colour. They cover PC with Parallel, PC with USB, and Mac with USB setup. We cannot possibly see how Canon can improve on the supplied documentation.

Printer drivers are almost identical across the board for the Canon product range. They are exceptionally user friendly and feature rich and, rather than go into verbose detail for all the printers in this comparison, we have instead inserted screen shots of the driver's functionality. The only gripe we had was that all of the Canon printers tested would not produce multiple copies with the current drivers from PhotoShop 5.0 LE. Selecting 20 copies from PhotoShop would only produce a single copy (we had to resort to setting the page layout properties in the printer driver to achieve the desired output). We found, however, the problem was confined to PhotoShop; MS Word, for example, happily printed 20 copies without resorting to directly changing the printer driver settings.

The Canon features no less than three different cartridge configurations for most printing tasks. For -high-speed" black only printing the large BC-20 ink/printhead cartridge is the choice. If you need to knock out some reports with text and coloured charts then pop in the BC-21e printhead, which consists of a small replaceable black cartridge and a CMY (cyan, magenta, and yellow) cartridge. But, if the task is a family portrait, for example, then the BC-22e Photo ink/printhead cartridge is the best for the job. Admittedly it can be a little annoying swapping cartridges around but remember: this is a very low cost printer.

Canon has taken advantage of the fact that the entire printhead assembly can be replaced and have produced pop-in scanner modules for each of the printers we tested. The small unit for the 2100SP for example has an optical resolution of 360dpi and the scanning process resembles printing except the printer is fed with the original to scan. That scanned data is sent to the PC.

Cartridge life is very good when using the beefy black cartridge: it output no fewer than 620 pages at 5 percent coverage for a cost of just 9 cents per page. The small -standard" colour cartridge managed just 160 pages at 15 percent colour, but it is a considerably longer life than the comparable Lexmarks, for example. Page cost in our colour tests ran to around 18 cents per page.

The rear sheet feeder has a 100-sheet capacity and can feed stock up to 105gsm.

Peak throughput is not too shabby at 2.8ppm but most of its price point competition sits above 3ppm and in one case, the HP 640C peaks at 4ppm. Setting the output quality to something a touch more realistic and feeding the printer the 4-page complex document brings the throughput right down to 0.69ppm, but then all of the other printers have the stuffing knocked out of them by this test also. In fact the HP 640C drops below the Canon, and the Lexmark is only marginally faster.

Print quality was quite good, though a little pale to some of our judges (though Canon claims that this is the intent of its printers, as it is a more -realistic" colour).

Considering its very low price point the results from the photorealism test are great. Admittedly you must substitute a photo cartridge for the standard cartridge to obtain this output but then this is the approach many of the other printers in the comparison take as well. The colour fidelity was surprisingly good, better than many of the more expensive printers at the drivers default saturation levels. Fine detail was also pretty good but the dot size at times is intrusive and as a consequence some of the dither patterns can be a touch coarse, relatively speaking of course.

Canon BJC-3000

The new BJC-3000 from Canon certainly sets the cat amongst the pigeons at the sub-$300 price point. For your money you get a printer capable of 1440 x 720dpi and each ink is contained in its own independent cartridge. This is the lowest cost printer we have seen that has this separate-ink-cartridge featureâ€"all the other vendor printers at this price point (and sometimes substantially higher priced units as well) bundle the CMY inks together in the one cartridge. And, as we can testify after our testing of the printers, you definitely do not run out of all three inks at the same time. In many cases yellow ran out while we still had plenty of cyan and magenta left. With the 3000 it is an inexpensive task to just purchase a new yellow cartridge. In the case of the other vendors you must toss away the old cartridge with its remaining cyan and magenta inks and purchase a much more expensive triple colour cartridge.

Of course the Lab staff really appreciate neat little innovations, and starting with the 3000 and continuing on up the Canon line, the printers have an optical ink level sensor. It works like this: each cartridge has a tiny plastic prism in the base, and when the ink covers it any light projected through it simply gets absorbed by the ink. When the ink falls below the prism, the air on the other side of the plastic, rather than ink, results in total internal reflection in the prism and light is bounced back to a waiting sensor. Pretty cool, and much more accurate than the systems used by many of the other vendors, some of whom simply estimate when the cartridge is empty.

The printer looks pretty much like its larger brethren: it sports both a parallel and USB port with a single status LED and power and form feed controls located on top of the printer. Yes, a scanner cartridge can be fitted in lieu of the print head and it features twice the resolution of the 2100SP's at 720dpi.

Cartridge life is good in black, outputting 420 pages at 5 percent coverage, and very good in colour with 347 pages at 15 percent. This equates to 7 cents per black page and 24 cents per colour page. But, and it is a very big but, this does not take into account that you only need replace whichever single cartridge has expired at a small cost of $27.64. So, in reality, the actual page cost is far less for colourâ€"conservatively around half the cost: 12 cents.

Paper handling is pretty typical with up to 100 sheets of A4 following a pretty lazy -L" paper path from the ADF (Automatic Document Feeder) with the maximum recommended stock 105gsm. Documentation, while not quite as good as the exceptional 2100SP, is still very good indeed with the three Getting Started guides for PC Parallel/USB and Mac USB setup.

The price is very good and so is the output quality so it comes as no surprise that peak throughput, at times, has suffered slightly. All black printing is no problem with a BC-30 print head installed that supplies 160 black print nozzles the 3000 manages a pretty respectable 4.8ppm right in line with the BJC-6200. However if you pop in the BC-33 print head with just 48 nozzles for each of black, cyan, magenta, and yellow then all-black printing drops back to a more sedate 2.3ppm. Average throughput with the complex Word document (by necessity using the BC-33 print head) found the 3000 dropping back to just 0.37ppm. Admittedly output quality in both cases was very good and definitely a cut above the 2100SP with better character formation and darker, more even, black fills.

The performance news was not all bad with the 3000 posting a pretty impressive 0.18ppm in our photo print test, outperforming all the other Canon products with the exception of the awesome 8200.

Photo quality was really quite good but not a great deal better than the 2100SP, which really shows how good the 2100SP is. The -drop modulation technology" present in the 3000 and higher speced Canon printers varies the size of the ink droplet on the page and this did result in slightly finer dithering when compared to the 2100SP that lacks this feature. The colour, particularly blue skies, was more realistic than the 2100SP but again not by much. As far as we are concerned, there is nothing better than the BJC-3000 for under $300.

Canon BJC-6200

At first glance the 6200 simply looks like a larger version of the 3000 and, in some respects, it is. The styling is the same; paper handling is identical, as are the printer drivers and the pair of parallel and USB ports.

Your really have to -lift the hood", if you pardon the term, to see where the two printers differ. Instead of a single printhead/ink cartridge carrier, the 6200 has a pair of carriers. This bestows on the 6200 a great performance advantage and also more functionality.

The configuration for everyday printing comprises a large black cartridge and printhead (BC-30) in the left carrier and a CMY printhead (BC-31) and individual cartridges in the right-hand carrier. Each of the CMY colours has a 48-nozzle print head, identical to the 3000 but the large black is mated to the 160-nozzle printhead. For photo printing, the user removes the BC-30 printhead from the left carrier and replaces it with the BC-32 printhead (complete with 48-nozzles for each of photo black, photo cyan, and photo magenta).

The 6200 utilises exactly the same ink cartridges as the 3000 and is rated at the same 1440 x 720dpi resolution so it comes as no surprise that ink cartridge life should be similar. In fact, the black cartridge life was a tad higher for the 6200â€"it achieved 480 pages at 5 percent coverage while colour cartridge life was also a little better at 360 pages of 15 percent coverage. As we mentioned in the 3000 review, the colour cost is a bit misleading as you may only need to replace a single cartridge, so in reality the cost per colour page could be around half that calculated, or even less. Black pages are easy to calculate at 6 cents per page, colour works out to 23 per page but we would estimate that 14 would not be unreasonable to expect.

Peak page throughput was identical to the 3000 at 4.8ppm, which is certainly very good for its class, and while average throughput with the complex document took a bit of a tumble it was still a good deal quicker than the 3000 with a score of 0.64ppm. As you may expect, the character formation was identical to the 3000 with quite sharp text and reasonably rich and solid black fills.

Print time for the photo test proved slightly longer than the 3000 with a page speed of 0.16ppm which is nevertheless quite respectable. It's splitting hairs but image quality was also slightly better than the 3000. We found the 6200's skin colours were a little more realistic than the 3000 and at times the dither patterns were slightly less intrusive which may be a function of the fact that the 6200 boasts six ink colours compared to the 3000's four.

Canon BJC-6500

Only two of the printers we received were capable of producing A3 output and the Canon BJC-6500 was the first of them. The printer is rated at 1440 x 720dpi and at $699 is reasonably priced, given its features. The printer's styling is typical of Canon's current BubbleJet range and includes an internal AC adaptor and both parallel and USB ports. The top of the printer features a status LED, power, and form feed buttons and, in addition to a paper thickness lever for the print heads, to cater for envelopes, the paper feed mechanism can also be adjusted for various paper thicknesses.

The documentation is identical to all the other Canon printers reviewed except the 2100SP which features a more detailed manual. That is not to say the documentation is not goodâ€"they are excellent with three large -Getting Started" sheets for the various PC Parallel/USB combinations and USB with the Mac. The User's Guide is easy to read, the layout is clear and certainly covers operations in enough detail for the average user.

Lifting the front cover while powered up moves the printheads out for cartridge replacement. The 6500 features dual printheads, the leftmost can be configured with a black printhead and cartridge for day-to-day printing in conjunction with the CMY colour print head at the right. Alternatively a photo print head and cartridge can be fitted in this location and along with the standard provides six print colours; black, photo cyan, photo magenta, and, in the standard cartridge, cyan, magenta, and yellow. Printheads can be replaced independently which is great because the print heads can typically last several cartridge refills before failing, thus saving money.

Also, each colour has its own cartridge so you only need to replace the exhausted cartridge.

Cartridge life was quite good in black (480 pages at 5 percent coverage) and reasonable in colour (293 pages at 15 percent coverage). This breaks down to around 6 cents per black page and 28 cents per colour page. As previously mentioned, a more conservative estimate of the colour cost, given the individual cartridges, is 16 cents per page.

The ADF can hold up to 100 sheets up to A3 in size and feed stock up to 105gsm.

The 6500 is a good deal quicker than the last Canon A3 printer we tested (the 4650). With simple Word documents in black the 6500 peaked at 4.2ppm, almost twice as quick as the 4650. Average throughput was 0.95ppm, which is average for its class and the fastest of all the Canon printers tested. Character formation was pretty good, on par with the HP 970Cxi. We did note however, that on plain paper the black fill was not as dark as many of the other vendors' printers, notably the Lexmark. This improved dramatically on the high quality inkjet paper used for the photo test output, but then so did all the other vendors' products.

Photo output was very good with great colour fidelity at default driver settings, this appears to be a trademark of the current Canon range. Detail was very good and the dither pattern only became intrusive under very close scrutiny. A4 photo output from the 6500, and many of the other vendors' products for that matter, could happily sit framed on the mantlepiece and fool 99 percent of observers that it was a true photo.

Canon BJC-8200

Superficially, the 8200 does not look a lot different to the 6200. For example, I/O, controls and general functionality remain the same, but to leave this impression would be a gross injustice. Whereas all the other printers in this test are considered -jack of all trades"â€"a letter here a report there and the occasional photo print, the 8200 is neatly pigeonholed by Canon as a Professional Photographic Printer.

Yes, if push comes to shove the 8200 will print a letter or report; print a photo, however, and the 8200 takes you to a whole new level.

What has the 8200 got over Canon's other products to justify its claim of producing -Ultra Photographic Resolution"? For a start, the printer has six colour inks, black, cyan, magenta, yellow, photo cyan, and photo magenta. Each colour has its own ink cartridge so as one runs out you only change that colour. This helps keep waste and running cost down.

The printhead can also be easily removed and replaced with a new one should it ever become blocked or damaged and there is an optional snap in 600dpi scanner cartridge as well. The true print resolution is 1200 x 1200dpi and to quickly lay down this many dots per inch each colour has a 256 nozzle printhead. Each droplet is a tiny 4 picolitres (pl) and Canon claims its new star-shaped aperture on each nozzle results in more accurate dot shape and placement than the competition. Each pixel can also receive up to 42 of these 4pl dots resulting in extremely smooth graduations.

We were surprised to find that, in addition to the standard sheet feeder, the 8200 includes a manual feed at the rear which improves paper handling immensely with Canon claiming 500gsm can be accommodated.

The printer's documentation is very good indeed with a small User Guide that adequately covers printer operation and the most impressive Setup Guide we have ever seen. The Guide is 12 large pages covered with high-quality screen shots and coloured diagrams that hold your hand through every single stage of the setup process, right down to how to interpret the print head alignment pattern.

While each of the 8200 ink cartridges are relatively small they nevertheless managed to cover a lot of paper before expiring. The 8200's black cartridge is smaller than any of the other Canon printers and so it came as no surprise that it did not go as far, but with 340 pages output at 5 percent coverage it was still at least as good or better than the Lexmark printers. Colour life was a different story with one of the cartridges not giving up the ghost until it had printed 407 colour pages at 15 percent coverage. Only the relatively expensive HP high-capacity colour cartridge lasted longer (but with that one you must toss the entire cartridge; the 8200 features individual colours). Cost per black page breaks down to 8 cents per page. Our formula for calculating cost per page for the 8200 is even less fair or realistic given that it has five individual ink tanks (not counting black) and we only needed to replace one at the end of the 407 pages while cyan for example was still two-thirds full. So even though our calculations yield a page cost of 34 for a colour page, we would expect it to be well below 15 cents per page in reality.

As we mentioned earlier, the 8200 is an -artist" so its not great at banging out mundane things like letters and reports. It is in fact quite slow in the peak throughput test: 2.1ppm, which is a good deal slower than all the printers with the exception of the Brother portable. Average throughput is a reasonable 0.92ppm.

Ah, but now we step into its realm of expertise: photo output and here it pulled out all the stops and blitzed the field. At its highest quality mode it produced the photo test in an astonishing 3 minutes and 23 seconds for a throughput of 0.30ppmâ€"significantly faster than any of the other printers tested. The quality of the output was breathtaking. Even with a magnifying glass the individual dots are still very subtle. Colour fidelity was close to spot on with excellent skintones for example. Of the current batch of printers under test the output was undeniably superior, as one would expect given its specs.

Epson Stylus Color 680

Editors' Choice

We found ourselves with mixed emotions when we first unpacked Epson's new Stylus 680. On the one hand, we wanted to pat the engineers on the back for breaking the mould and trying to design a more interesting looking printer.On the other hand, some of us wanted to send the engineers back to design school (or at least reduce their medication). The 680 is certainly curvaceous, and the flexible, translucent front paper tray that literally folds back and clips to two bright chrome knobs on the top of the printer is nothing short of daring.

Both the Epson printers provided to the Lab were pre-production units with no -tree"-based documentation, and initially no drivers either. Luckily the drivers and, for the 680 at least, spare ink cartridges to perform life tests arrived in time for testing. We also noticed that the 680's case, which appears to be clipped together much the same as the other printers, had a nasty habit of unclipping and threatening to fall apart. We are pretty certain this -feature" will not be present on the production units; otherwise, the unit was quite robust.

It should be noted that the Epson cartridges cannot be removed and replaced on a whim. When first installed in the printer the cartridges undergo a pneumatic -charging" operation and if removed before empty they apparently become unusable. The printer does keep track of ink levels and amongst the controls on the front panel is a dual function cartridge replacement/print head clean button. This control will move the cartridges from their docked position if either the black or colour ink has run out, otherwise it will initiate a printhead clean cycle. Other controls include the power switch and form feed button, additional status indicators include paper out and power/data LEDs. All the Epson printers feature internal AC power adaptors that take standard -PC" style power cables. I/O runs to the now standard parallel and USB ports.

Epson claims a pretty phenomenal 2880dpi horizontal resolution with a more common 720dpi vertical resolution from both the 680 and 880 printers. Although the printer drivers only offer resolutions up to 1440dpi it may well be that Epson is claiming that the ink drop size can be reduced to the size of a -2880dpi" droplet. To Epson's credit there is no need to swap ink cartridges when you swap print jobs.

Cartridge life was pretty good with 420 pages output at 5 percent black coverage and 313 pages at 15 percent colour coverage. Taking the cost of the cartridges into account this breaks down to 14 cents per black page and 16 cents per colour page.

Epson has developed inks that are jack-of-all-trades and although they do appear more pale than some of the competition on plain paper (only slightly), they are just as vivid and saturated on high-quality inkjet paper. And, more to the point, the four ink colours manage to capture all the subtle colour variations of the many of the six colour printers we looked at. Another interesting difference between the Epson printers and other vendors is that the print heads are fixed, the user does not remove or replace them and we have witnessed many Epson inkjet printers plug away year after year without wearing out the print heads. Of course, if something does go wrong out of warranty you are possibly going to be up for a bit of money to replace the heads.

The automatic document feeder (ADF) holds up to 100 sheets of paper and, according to the on-line documentation provided with the printer, up to 90gsm paper can be fed by the ADF.

Peak throughput was very good, well up on the 660 we previously tested at around 4.2ppm. Initially we were shocked at how slow the 680 was producing the complex Word document at 720dpi; it took well over 10 minutes, which works out to 0.4ppm. We then tried a different approach and simply selected the -medium" quality level from the driver's quality slide bar (without resorting to using the advanced controls to select 720dpi). This actually equated to Epson's high-quality 360dpi mode and performance improved greatlyâ€"throughput climbed to 1.53ppm. We decided to utilise this setting as there was very little difference in quality between the two settings and it was in fact superior to quite a few of the other printers running at the higher resolutions. Character formation was quite good and colour and black area fills on plain paper were very even but slightly pale; there is an improvement in the density of black for example at the higher resolution setting but it is minor and certainly not worth four times the wait.

We certainly could not complain about pale colours when using inkjet paper, however; the colours were stunning, perhaps just the tiniest bit too saturated but otherwise colour fidelity was spot on. Detail was also excellent with very fine dither patterns, in fact the 680's photo output quality was so good that only two printers were superior, the Epson 880 and the Canon 8200, both far more expensive.

Epson Stylus Color 880

Past iterations of Epson's 6xx and 8xx printers have followed the same basic styling cues, the 8xx has simply been equipped with a faster print engine. The x80 series now sees some divergence in the design, cosmetically at least. The 880 is, externally, not all that different from the model is supersedes and includes identical control and I/O functionality to the 680. (Unfortunately we did not receive consumables in time to complete cartridge life tests on the 880.)

The 880 we received was definitely a preproduction unit, as were the supplied drivers on CDR. Given the printer's enhanced capabilities over the 680 (such as 144 black nozzles and 48 nozzles per CMY colour compared to the latter's 64 black and 32 CMY colour), it would be fair to expect the 880 to be the faster of the two. This is certainly what we have witnessed in the past, but in our tests this did not prove to be so. The 880 actually performed slightly slower than the 680, which, to be blunt, is quite obviously wrong. We did the performance testing several times when we noticed the discrepancy and were unable to improve the 880's output speed.

The drivers are pretty much identical for both printers and we ensured identical quality settings were utilised for both printers. We are unsure as to where the problem lay, be it printer driver or printer firmware, but we would expect the production version of the 880 to be a good deal faster.

It may simply be variability in the manufacturing but the 880 character formation was very slightly superior to the 680. Given the 880's failure to live up to our performance expectations in document tests we certainly did not expect it to perform any better in the Photo test. We were not mistaken: the output times were almost identicalâ€"rounded to 0.14ppm for each printer. The quality of the output was, of course, excellent and the 880 at default settings produced slightly more accurate skin tones than the 680 and as a consequence we actually scored the 880 slightly higher in this test.

HP DeskJet 640C

The 610C was tested just one year ago and cost, at the time, $249. Its successor, the 640C, is priced under the magic AU$200 mark. Cosmetically the 640C is a prettier printer than the 610C. It's still quite large and robust, and given the size, we were surprised that the AC power adaptor is still an external -brick". Ignoring the new façade, the overall design harks to printers way back in the HP family tree. For example, all the HP inkjets feature an output tray that stacks on top of the input tray and, to prevent smearing as pages are printed, a set of -plastic fingers" hold the current output off the top of the previous sheet and then retract and gently drop the output on top. The 900 series and to some extent the 800 series have all seen modifications and streamlining of the original design but if you look at the 640C you can view the original concept in all its glory.

The lower input tray caters for up to 100 A4 sheets and can, according to the manual, feed card stock up to 200gsm. We were a bit concerned that it may be difficult to clear paper jams given that there is no rear access to the tight -U"-shaped paper path, and HP has seen fit to provide a removable cover at the rear for all 800 and 900 series printers. Controls are very simple with a power button, formfeed button and three status LEDs.

Setup is certainly assisted by the two quick-start sheets provided, one is double sided and includes instructions for the PC with Parallel connectivity on one side and USB on the other. The third sheet is for the Mac and its USB connection. The paper based manual is very slim with just 24 pages in English which superficially cover the operation of the printer. If you need more info, then try the on-line docs, which at 70-pages appear to go into much more detail.

Cartridge replacement is easy: simply open the cover and the print cartridges undock and move to the centre of the carriage to facilitate access. The two cartridge bays are clearly colour coded with the left bay occupied by a CMY tricolour cartridge and the left either black or a photo cartridge. As with all the HP printers, the printheads are an integral part of the ink cartridge and each time you replace a cartridge you are replacing the heads as well. The 640C's print resolution varies depending on the type of print task undertaken, straight black printing is rated at up to 600 x 600dpi but let any colour sneak into the equation and the resolution drops back to 600 x 300dpi.

The 640C cartridges are not the same as the 900 and 1200 series printers and as a consequence the life expectancy of the cartridges varied. The 640C managed to produce 400 black pages with 5 percent coverage (just over half the 900 series, for example). Colour cartridge life was very good, certainly superior to the 900 series standard tricolour cartridges but then the 640C's colour cartridge was the high-yield version and we would expect around half the 360 pages obtained with the standard cartridge. Cost per page is around 15 cents for black and 19 cents for colour.

While the 640C may be the slowest of the HP printers in our benchmarks, it did manage a 4ppm peak throughput; the fastest in the sub-$200 price bracket. The 640C does choke a little on our complex Word document dropping back to 0.48ppmâ€"the slowest of the sub-$200 group. We found the 640C's text quality to be superior to the BJC-2100SP with very clean character formation and much richer blacks on plain paper, but the Lexmark Z22 is easily a cut above the HP.

At 0.11ppm, our photo test showed that the 640C is no speed demon but, to put it into perspective, it was still slightly faster than the other sub-$200 printers. The quality of the output on the other hand was found lacking when compared to the sub-$200 Canon and Lexmark. The dither patterns tended to be more coarse and intrusive than the other two and as a consequence some of the finer detail was -blurred" or at times even lost. Colour fidelity was quite good although the Canon 2100SP was superior in this regard.

HP DeskJet 840C

The overall design and packaging of the 840C is very similar to that of the 640C. Documentation is almost identical, although the USB and Parallel Quick Start guides have been split off onto two separate sheets.

The 100-sheet A4 paper feeder is functionally identical to the 640C but the implementation has been improved: rather than having to lift off the entire output tray to load the input tray with paper, the bottom of the output tray simply lifts on a hinge. HP has also extended the functionality of the hinge with a slide control that slightly angles the output tray to allow more clearance in the lower paper input tray to feed fan-fold paper. The finger-style paper supports have also been streamlined.

The AC adaptor is still external although the 840C's -brick" is much larger and is colour matched to the printer while the 640C's is black. Although the styling does vary slightly, the front mounted controls are identical to the 640C as is the presence of both parallel and USB ports.

Enough of what is the same, what extras does the 840C offer? While both printers have dual cartridge carriers and the 840C has both a CMY tri-colour and a black cartridge, the inks are formulated so that no photo cartridge is required or offered as an option. Again the printer's maximum resolution depends on the task, with 600 x 600dpi in black, and with HP's PhotoREt enabled, colour printing is at a higher resolution of 600 x 1200dpi. A large clip-off access hatch at the rear of the printer also simplifies clearing the tight -U"-shaped paper path in the unlikely event of a paper jam.

Unfortunately, we did not receive a second set of cartridges in time to carry out life testing.

In the race to output simple documents at an acceptable print quality the 840C is no faster than the 640Câ€"both output pages at a peak of 4ppm in -draft" mode. The quality of the output produced by the 840C was definitely superior as far as the simple Word document is concerned with much better character formation. Once the complexity of the printing task and quality demands are raised, the 840C convincingly forges ahead with almost twice the average output speed of the 640C. It achieved a score of 0.87ppm.

In this test, the output quality of both was similar as far as character formation was concerned although the graphics sprinkled in the document were significantly better with the 840C. On plain paper the 840C's output was also superior to the Epson 680, another $350 printer, with deeper blacks and clearer graphics.

On high-quality inkjet paper, however, the Epson turns the tables on the 840C. The 840C is quicker delivering the print at 0.16ppm and its definition is definitely superior to the 640C but the Epson 680 has much finer and less intrusive dithering. The 840C's output is also a tad oversaturated, the baby face so rosy it goes beyond -glowing health". We also found the greys to be too blue. Of course much of this can be remedied in the printer driver but we test the printers at their default colour settings, which is what the bulk of users will tend to do.

HP DeskJet 930C

The only model in HP's 900 series that we have previously tested is the 970Cxi so we were interested to see what the 930C had to offer, and what corners, if any, had been cut for the 930C to sell for a rather substantial $360 less than the 970Cxi. Obviously we were also eager to see what benefits the 930C presented over the 840C for around $100 more.

The 900 series has more curvaceous lines than any of the previous HP inkjets and while more sophisticated than the earlier series, as we shall see, the similarity in functionality is very obvious. The paper handling is the very latest from HP and it even offers some advantages (and disadvantages) over the 970Cxi. The configuration still consists of a lower input tray with an output tray positioned above. Well, calling the output area a tray is a bit like calling a raft a ship; yes, both should keep you dry but one is a good deal more substantial.

That's not to say HP's solution is not clever, you see only the lower half of the output sheet is fully supported by a -mini-tray"; the top half of the page is only supported at the very end. This actually works fineâ€"the reason HP has -shaved" off some of the output tray is that it now allows the entire tray assembly to fold up against the body of the printer for easier transport and storage, the only one amongst the tested HP products that can achieve this feat. The tray is smaller than the 970Cxi and as a consequence holds fewer sheets of paper: 100 A4 sheets, in fact. HP claim stock up to a pretty hefty 200gsm can be fed and, should a paper jam occur, a large panel at the rear of the printer can be removed to clear it.

The rear panel can be removed entirely and (although at a quick glance we could not find it on the 930C's option list) we confirmed the 970Cxi's duplexer can be attached.

The AC power supply has been moved to the inside of the printer where, in our opinion, it should be. The top-mounted control panel includes a power switch, a cancel button, a resume button, and three status LEDs (one indicates the printer is powered up, the second indicates error conditions, and the third signals one of the cartridges is out of ink). On the subject of cartridges, when the printer cover is lifted, the carriers undock and the distance they travel depends on the cartridge status, a yellow arrow on the cartridge carrier points to legends embossed on the plastic above.

The cartridge moves out a short distance and points to a smiley face icon if all is OK. The other four options in order are black low, colour low, black out, and colour out.

Like the 800 series, no -Photo" colour cartridge is requiredâ€"the printer has a single black and a single CMY tri-colour cartridge. Black cartridge life is pretty darn impressive for all the 900 and 1200 series printers. At 680 pages the 930C is only bested by the 970Cxi and 1220C. The life of the standard tri-colour cartridge, however, is not as brilliant with just 213 pagesâ€"of the desktop printers only the Lexmark range fared worse. Cost per page breaks down to and inexpensive 10 cents for black and a relatively steep 33 cents for colour, using the standard cartridge.

Documentation is similar to the 800 series except that the User's Guide is a single language and more substantial running to 58 pages. Peak throughput for the 930C was the fourth fastest overall at an impressive 5.9ppm. Mind you, at this speed some registration errors tended to slip in. Stepping up to HP's -normal" setting for the complex document sees a marked increase in quality and the conquering of the misregistration errors with a score of 1.06ppm. Text formation was excellent with deep and rich blacks on par with the 970CXi, only the Lexmark printers were superior in this regard.

The 930C is no slouch when it comes to photo quality output either with a score of 0.22ppm placing it third fastest overall. The quality of the print was very good with great definition and quite fine dither patterns although the default setting produced over saturated colours marginally more so than the 970Cxi. This is a common trait of all the HP printers tested that do not utilise a photo ink cartridge, the 640C managed more restrained colour with its photo cartridge, and we found tweaking the colour sliders in the driver's -advanced" page alleviated the problem.

HP DeskJet 970CXi

As previously mentioned, we have tested the 970Cxi before and we took the opportunity with this revisit to see what your extra AU$360 buys over the 930C.

Visually the two printers are nearly identical. The most obvious difference is that while the 930C's paper tray has been designed to fold, the 970Cxi's does not. The 970Cxi's fixed paper tray, while functionally similar, is a more refined beast than the 600 and 800 series printers and while the paper thickness is pegged at a maximum of 200gsm, the input tray capacity has been increased by 50 percent to 150 A4 sheets.

The duplexer is a standard accessory with the 970Cxi and is one of the most elegant yet simple solutions we have seen. The duplexer is attached to the printer by removing the rear access hatch and clipping the unit in place. A series of electrical contacts help the printer identify that the unit is attached and the mechanism is driven by a series of gears that are driven off the 970Cxi's paper feed motor. When paper is placed into the printer's input tray it follows a -U"-shaped path up to the print heads and in the process the pager is flipped over, the duplexer does not interfere with this action. To print on the reverse side, the page is simply reverse fed into the duplexing unit where it is flipped over as it passes through a second U. How simple is that?

Internally there are also some improvements to the 970Cxi over the 930C. For a start the former has a faster printing action and the monthly duty cycle has increased from 2000 pages to an impressive 5000 pages. HP also claims the 970Cxi's high-resolution colour mode is 2400 x 1200dpi.

As previously mentioned, the 970Cxi utilises the same cartridges as the 930C and while the cartridge life results were quite similar a lot of the variation may be attributable to manufacturing variations for the cartridges. The 970Cxi managed 720 black pages at 5 percent coverage and 253 colour pages at 15 percent coverage. Obviously the cost per page is also similar to the 930C at 9 cents per black page and a slightly cheaper 28 cents per colour page.

In Draft mode, which produces quite acceptable output (though the occasional slight misregistration halfway down a line of text can be annoying), the 970Cxi is almost a page per minute faster than the 930C with a peak of 6.8ppmâ€"only the Lexmark Z52 was quicker and then only by 0.1ppm.

In our complex document test, the 970Cxi was fourth quickest overall at 1.18ppm. And, at this output speed, the text quality was superb with sharp well-defined fonts, rich black area fills and very sharp and colourful graphics, all on plain paper. The Epson printers may be quicker in this test but then they are printing at a lower resolution. Even at 720dpi, where the Epson printers are much slower, the output quality still lagged behind the HP. The Lexmark range of printers did produce more impressive text, barely, but the 970Cxi's graphical finesse on plain paper was superior.

What about HP's claim of 2400 x 1200dpi in photo quality printing? The output quality was marginally better than the 930C with finer dither patterns, courtesy of the finer dots presumably. The colours on the high-definition inkjet paper was a tad overblown but of course this can be corrected by tweaking the printer driver. Yes, the output quality is certainly very impressive but then so was the output from the Epson printers and a couple of the Canon's, notably the incredible 8200. Output times for the print were very impressive at 0.21ppm.

HP DeskJet 1220C

Stretch a 970Cxi to cater for A3 paper and add a few more bells and whistles (and an additional $190), and what do you get? HP's 1220C. Admittedly, this is a gross oversimplification but as far as functionality goes its comes pretty close to the truth. The only feature missing on the 1220C is the neat duplexing attachment. There is a removable rear panel to facilitate clearing of paper jams but sadly there are not facilities to attach a duplexing unit. There is, however, a rear manual paper feed that can cater for stock up to 250gsm while the front ADF is simply a larger version of the 970Cxi paper feeder, again with up to a 150-sheet capacity. Also calling the printer an A3 printer is underselling it, HP's term -wide format" is more accurate as the printer can cope with 33cm x 48.3cm sized paper, A3 for comparison is only 29.7cm x 42cm.

Front panel controls, while cosmetically different, are nevertheless functionally identical to the 900 series. Standard I/O includes parallel and USB ports and the 1220C's duty cycle is the same as the 970Cxi at 5000 pages per month. HP does have a 1220C/PS version of the printer that includes Postscript and Adobe PressReady Basics software.

Documentation is typical of the HP range of printers and it is worth mentioning that the printer is certainly built to last with very robust construction.

The 1220C was fitted with the same black cartridge used in the 900 series printers tested and page life was commensurate at 760 pages. The tri-colour cartridge fitted however was the -high-yield" version and it came up with a staggering 667 colour pages. It was not surprising that the cost per black page was 9 cents but at just 19 cents for colour, the high-yield cartridge proved very cost effective.

In our testing we found the 1220C's print speed to be almost identical to the 970Cxi with peak and average throughput speeds of 6.7ppm and 1.05ppm respectively for A4 pages. However, what was surprising, given the two printers identical resolution specifications and the similarity of printer drivers, is that the 1220C's character formation was not as clean as the 970Cxi at identical driver settings and this was quite noticeable. We found the white on black text to be not as sharp and the character formation a touch ragged. That's not to say the print quality was poor, it was still quite good, and the black characters and fill patterns on plain paper were still sensationally rich and even and graphics at the -normal" driver settings were on par with the 970Cxi.

Outputting the photo tests proved to be marginally quicker on the 1220C than the 970Cxi, but only by a scant 0.02ppm, again for an A4 page. And, while the colour was still a tad over saturated the 1220C's output was not as -blue" and cold as the 970Cxi's, with colours more true to the original at the driver's default settings.

Lexmark Z22 & Z32

When you're on a good thing stick to it, that's a phrase that Lexmark has applied with great enthusiasm to the current range of Z-series printers. All the way from the Z22 up to the Z52 they look identicalâ€"only the printers' physical dimensions appear to differ. And, there is a lot to be said for creating an instantly identifiable corporate -look" to your product range.

What did tend to confuse us, however, was the pair of twins the Z22 and Z32. You see, other than the price, there is precious little to distinguish between the two. Yes, they have a different model number and, according to Lexmark, the Z22 is 1ppm slower than the Z32 producing black printing but they are the same speed outputting colour. That's it folks.

However, Lexmark has taken an interesting step to differentiate the two printers. The Z22 is supplied with only a CMY tri-colour cartridge while the Z22 also ships with a black cartridge. The Z22 still has a vacant carrier spot for the black cartridge but the user can make do with composite blacks from the CMY cartridge. Obviously, the Z22 in this configuration will be a tad slower, and the composite black will be nowhere near as deep and rich as when using the black ink cartridge but you can always shell out the extra dollars for a black cartridge at some later date. Unfortunately, this configuration difference was passed onto the Lab well after testing had been completed using the supplied CMY and black cartridges for the Z22. If you wish to obtain the highest-quality photo output possible from any of the Lexmark printers an optional Photo print cartridge must be purchased. Lexmark claims the Z22/32 are capable of 1200 x 1200dpi in both black and colour.

In all but one case the Lexmark print cartridges produced fewer pages than the other printer vendors. The Z22 and Z32 managed 220 and 240 black pages at 5 percent coverage, respectively, while colour pages totalled 133 and 137 pages at 15 percent coverage. And, given the cost of the cartridges is not all that different when compared to the other vendors, the cost per page will obviously be higher; between 26 and 29 cents per page for black and 47 to 50 cents per page for colour.

The printers are quite solidly constructed, with the exception of the sheet feeder, which is a little flimsy. They weigh very little, that is, until you add the weight of the hefty external -brick" AC adaptor. The four Lexmark printers tested all feature parallel and USB ports, the sheet feeders have a 100-sheet capacity and stock up to a hefty 275gsm can be fed through the -L"-shaped paper path. Documentation is nothing stunning but we would certainly rate it as adequate. Included is a double-sided A3 quick installation guide, which is certainly not as informative or -pretty" as the HP and Canon equivalents, a small paper manual that very briefly covers operations, and an online manual in PDF format.

The single printer driver, labelled like the documentation with the title -Lexmark Z22/Z32", is also a giveaway that the two must be pretty similar in function right down to the firmware level.

As previously mentioned, the Z32 is rated as the fastest of the two printers when printing plain black text, both with black cartridges fitted, however our peak throughput tests show that at the same quality settings -Quick Print 600" the Z22 and Z32 performed identically with a score of 3.3ppm. Surprisingly at this setting the Z32 produced many more registration errors than the Z22. It was a similar performance story in the average throughput test with both printer drivers set to -Normal 600dpi" the scores were line ball at 0.74 and 0.74ppm. However, at this setting, the Z32 behaved itself with no errors at all and, in fact, the quality of the text output was nothing short of stunning. All the Lexmark printers from the baby Z22 up to the Z52 produce exceptionally crisp, black characters, superior in quality to even the best of the competition. Graphics at this resolution were good, but we did find that in some of the large black fill areas the distribution was a tad uneven.

The Z22/32 were both quite slow in the photo output test with scores of 0.09ppm and 0.1ppm, respectively. The quality of the outputs with the photo cartridge installed was good with quite good colour fidelity although the Canon 2100SP for example produced more accurate skin tones and its dither patterns were a tad finer.

Lexmark Z42 & Z52

Functionally, the Z42 and Z52 are pretty much identical to the Z22/32 printers, they are simply larger in stature, faster, and boast higher resolution. In the process of making the Z42/52 bigger, Lexmark also took the opportunity to make the two more robust. For example, the fold out support for the sheet feeder is not as flimsy and, being the nominal -flagship" of the range, the Z52 boasts a two-tone grey plastic finish and a cover at the rear to hide the parallel, USB and power connectors. The Z52 with its higher throughput rating also appears to need more -juice" to drive it and forgoes the 30V 0.5A external AC power adaptor of the other three printers for an even larger external -brick" with a 30V 1A rating.

The printer drivers for both units also boast more bells and whistles than the more basic driver of the Z22/32 printers. Print resolution has taken a climb to 2400 x 1200dpi and Lexmark claims the Z52 has at least twice the print speed of the Z22, for example.

The documentation is pretty much the same as the Z22/32's docs, although the Z52 has been endowed with a -prettier" quick setup sheet. All four printers utilise the same model Photo cartridge but our cartridge life tests only focus on the black and standard tri-colour cartridges. Outputting 320 and 340 pages at 5 percent black, respectively, the Z42 and Z52 were quite a way behind many of their competitors. Colour cartridge life was also mediocre and not helped by what we assume was a -crook" cartridge on the Z42 which only had a life of 147 pages at 15 percent coverage, compared to the Z52's 207 pages. Given the purchase price of the cartridges this breaks down to a pretty steep 20 to 21 cents for black. Colour is not so bad as the cartridge is modestly priced and if we ignore the Z42 results the cost per 15 percent colour page is around 38 cents.

In our performance tests, we found that the Z42/52 printers certainly do up the ante when it comes to churning out straight text documents with the Z42 peaking at 5.3ppm and the Z52, the fastest of all the printers tested, at 6.9ppm. Anything more complex however takes the wind out of both printers sails with an average throughput of 1.04ppm and 1.24ppm, respectively, for the Z42 and Z52. This is still significantly faster than the Z22/32 printers and in the case of the Z52 was still enough to propel it to second place. The average throughput test was performed with the drivers set to -Normal 600 x 600" and the quality of the text output was stunning. All the Lexmark printers produced sharp well-defined characters with strong rich blacks, even white on black text was sharp. Black area fills at this resolution were not as even as most of the competitors on plain paper although the graphics output on plain paper was on par with most of the competition.

The Z42 and Z52 printers were the slowest in their class producing photo output with scores of 0.1 and 0.12, respectively. The quality of the output was certainly superior to the Z22/32 printers the dither patterns and ink droplets were noticeably finer and less intrusive. However, given Lexmark's claim of 2400 x 1200dpi the ink droplet size and pitch appeared a little coarse when compared to many of the competition. The colour of the Z42 was more natural than the Z52 at default settings, the Z52 was just a touch too over saturated.

Mobile Printing

Brother MP-21C

The 21C is the same model we tested in 1999, only this time we did not receive the optional cut sheet feeder and for a bit of a lark had to manually feed the pages for the 10-page peak throughput tests.

The printer is a small charcoal -brick" that, to reduce the amount of desk space it takes up, stands on its side. The robust printer is only 300mm long, 50mm deep and 106mm high, beautifully engineered, and weighs in at only 1kg. The manual feed works reasonably well, the user must gently feed the paper into the provided slot, after a moment's hesitation the printer takes the page, pulls it through, then reverses it slightly to ensure the print starts as close to the top edge as possible. Output is also pretty simpleâ€"straight out onto the desktop.

The 21C does not have a power supply, nor does it have a parallel adaptor cable for its only proprietary port. Instead, the printer ships with a PC Card that plugs into your notebook and through the connector cable provides both communications and power to the printer. Apparently the printer's power needs are minuscule and the PC Card port easily copes with the printer power load. There is apparently a parallel adaptor cable available but if you go this route you will also need to purchase the tiny 200g AC power supply as well.

Controls are minimalâ€"the power button also functions as a resume and form feed control in a printer error situation and the only other control initiates head cleaning. The Windows printer driver is also pretty minimalistic with nowhere near the customising features of most of the desktop units. The four status LEDs indicate a variety of conditions including power on, printer error and cartridge running low or out of ink completely.

Installing ink cartridges is simple: the front cover opens and the cartridges, two only, slot into the top of the printer. The print head cannot be replaced by the user and, the format of the ink cartridges is quite unusual. There is a large black and cyan cartridge and a smaller magenta and yellow cartridge. This can be a bit of a bummer if you do a lot of black printing as you are always tossing out a potentially quite full cyan cartridge as well. The printer does have a neat feature in that it does have a two colour mode to help you through a potential crisis if one cartridge runs dry.

Because we had no sheet feeder, a cartridge life test was not carried out this time (feeding the sheets one by one being a bit of a chore). However, our test results from last year indicated a life of around 180 page of 5 percent black and 97 pages of 15 percent colour.

Unfortunately, the cartridges are not inexpensive with the cost per black page a steep 31 cents while colour pages are around 58 cents.

Documentation was very good with a comprehensive Users Guide and a surprisingly comprehensive Quick Setup Guide that runs to 17 pages. On the plus side the printer will not annoy anyone nearby while printing because it is very quiet in operation.

All our performance testing was performed with the supplied PC Card interface and, as previously mentioned, using manual feed. Even so, we were surprisingly close to the performance results we obtained last year but with a peak throughput of just 0.7ppm, it's quite a while before output appears. Thankfully the printer is not much slower producing the output in the photo tests. At 0.45ppm the Brother is actually slightly faster than some of the desktop units tested.

Overall print quality was not up to that of the desktops but then again the quality is not too bad when you consider the units portability. Character formation, while no worse than last year, did not compare all that favourably with the newer, and improved, printers under test. The characters were a little ragged in comparison and were not as black as most other printers managed to produce. Areas of solid black fill are quite a pale grey and tend to be a little uneven but gradient fills were surprisingly smooth with little banding. The Brother popped out the photo print an excruciating 18 minutes after we hit the print button but to be fair the quality was really very good. Colour fidelity and the level of detail was very good, better than some of the desktops and a credit to such a small portable unit.

How We Tested

Colour Inkjet Printers
We tested each of the printers with an HP OmniBook 6000 notebook configured with a Pentium III 700, 128MB SDRAM and Windows 98. We paused the Print Manager until the entire file was processed by the notebook, then began timing from the moment we -un-paused" the Print Manager.

All of the tests were performed on Reflex 80GSM A4 paper with the exception of the photorealistic test where we used Resolution Computer Supplies 90GSM -High Resolution Premium Inkjet Paper".

The applications used during testing were:

• Word for Windows (Office 2000)
  • Adobe Photo Shop 5.0 LE
    • Adobe Acrobat Reader V4

    Wordâ€"Simple
    10-page Test
    This test comprised ten pages with a single font (Arial 10-point) and is used to evaluate the printer's maximum real-world throughput at its fastest 300 or 360dpi modeâ€"excluding -Economy" mode. We exclude Economy mode because we believe that Peak throughput should reflect a text print quality that is acceptable, and in most cases Economy mode produces output we would rate as unacceptable.

    We derive the PEAK Pages per minute (ppm) with the following formula:

    Peak ppm = (60 / (time to print all 10 pages - time to first page)) * 9

    Wordâ€"Complex
    4-page Test
    This test comprised four pages of complex word processing and includesâ€"18 different fonts some in multiple sizes, eight images ranging from simple clip art to high-res TIFF photos and multiple column styles. In almost all cases the printer driver was set to 600 or 720dpi plain paper mode for this test. We derive what we call our -Average ppm" figures from this test using the following formula (please note the time includes the time to print the first page):

    Average ppm = (60 / time to print all 4 pages) * 4

    Photo Realistic Graphics Test
    The very large 44MB test image was created and printed using PhotoShop 5.0 LE. The image is a composite comprising a large landscape with fine cloud, forest and wildflower detail, a sleeping baby, a vase of multicoloured flowers, a close-up of purple and white irises, an island and water scene, multicoloured balloon and finally a monochrome but highly detailed image of a cow skull hung on a weathered wooden panel. The diversity of the graphic content allows us to evaluate a whole range of printer abilities such as skin tones, sky colour fidelity, accuracy with fine white on colour details, accuracy of dithering (particularly in areas of low contrast), handling of low contrast shadows and overall colour or greyscale accuracy.

    The image also provides a good indication of the printer's speed with relatively complex graphics and is timed. The printer driver was set to its best -high-quality inkjet paper" mode for this test.

    Capability and Print Quality Tests
    There are three Adobe PDF files used to confirm the printer's language capabilities and determine its print quality in addition to the previous three tests. Unlike the previous tests these are not timed.

    Fontkey.PDF
    This test confirms the printers ability to correctly and accurately render multiple font sizes from 4-point up to 48-point in two font stylesâ€"Times New Roman and Gaudy Handtooled.

    Laserkey.PDF
    This test exercises the printers ability to produce smooth greyscale gradients, (both linear and greyscale,) smooth straight, oblique and radial fine lines and smooth solid black fills.

    Colorkey.PDF
    This test is similar to the previous test but also includes smooth colour gradations, ink mixing, fine yellow grid lines on a solid green background, and a JPEG image of a small child.

    Printing Quality Assessment
    Printer output was assessed for quality by the Test Lab staff, both with the naked eye and also an 8x magnifier. Purity was also judged with the naked eye, assessing how close the output was to the actual screen image. While we acknowledge this is a largely subjective process, especially given the different technologies we feel that most users would use similar purity criteria. Fonts were assessed for accuracy of formation, smoothing of radial and oblique edges and any evidence of ink -spatter" particularly in the white-on-black font test. Smoothness of colour/greyscale gradations and dithering was assessed, as was the accuracy of fine radial and oblique lines.

    Consumable life test
    We devised a new improved consumable life test for this inkjet comparison. Each vendor was requested to supply a second set of consumables for this test to ensure we obtained the longest cartridge life possible for each printer. Using Photo Shop we constructed two full page A4 graphic images, one a full page of black and the other a full colour page comprising one third page bands of Cyan, Magenta and Yellow. The first corresponds to 100 percent black coverage the second to 100 percent colour coverage. We then calculate the number of black pages at 5 percent average coverage, which equates to a simple monochrome text page, with the following formula:

    Pages(5%) = Pages(100%) *(100/5)

    The colour coverage is calculated at 15 percent average coverage, which roughly equates to an Excel graph or a report page that includes some embedded charts or graphics.

    Pages(15%) = Pages(100%) *(100/15)

    Printing the pages at a full 100 percent coverage simply cuts down on the paper consumed and in a small way lowers the burden on our forests. To further reduce the number of pages consumed the tests were carried out at either 600dpi or 720dpi (rather than 300dpi and 360dpi) depending on the resolutions supported by the printer. We also calculated a per page costing for both the black and coloured ink as follows:

    Cost = cost of ink refill / total pages printed

    Note that this does not take into account the cost of any other consumables such as paper for sample.
    

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