Bang for your buck: 4 Budget printers tested

By Alex Kidman
26 March 2004 09:35 AM
Tags: printer, printing, page, 3550, epson, canon, unit, colour
Budget Printers: How we tested

 Budget printers


 Introduction

 Canon i250
 Epson Stylus C43UX
 HP Deskjet 3550
 Lexmark z605
 How we tested
 Editor's Choice
 Specifications

Aside from examining the difficulty of setup and any other physical factors, all of the printers in our roundup underwent a series of tests to examine printing quality and speed over plain text, complicated documents with colour elements and photo printing.

Our single page text test used a simple full A4 page of text printing from Microsoft Word to examine the amount of time it took each printer to churn out a single page of ordinary text. While many manufacturers list maximum page per minute details based on draft printing modes, we tested with what each printer described as 'normal' printing quality to get an idea both of printing speeds and normal printing quality of each unit. The ten page text test used the same page printed consecutively to test the throughput of the printer over a period of time, so that any document caching or PC issues could be eliminated from the timed tests.

Our single page colour test was similar in operation to the single page text test, but instead using a corporate document that included colour elements and tables. Like the text test, printers were set to normal quality and assessed on both speed and print quality with a single timed page and ten-page test to elminate any possible PC bottlenecks.

Our photo printing test was performed on a single shot of only average quality, in order to stretch any photo optimisation these printers may contain to the limit. Printing was done through Adobe Photoshop elements and performed using each manufacturer's specified glossy photo paper with any photo enhancements turned on -- we can't see anyone printing on photo paper not wanting to improve their photographs as much as possible, and wanted to see how and if the enhancement process had any effect on overall printing times.

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Talkback 3 comments

    A Canon wins and the ads on th ...Anonymous -- 01/04/04

    A Canon wins and the ads on the site are for Epson? Ya gotta love that.

    Thanks for the review info. Lo ...Anonymous -- 11/04/04

    Thanks for the review info. Looks like Canon offers most economical operation with reasonable quality and print speed. I'm not worried about the output tray - will mount printer on a shelf, and make my own tray, which I will screw with some brackets under the printer shelf to catch the pages being spat out.

    Thank you! A big help in my se ...Anonymous -- 21/03/05

    Thank you! A big help in my search for a cheap printer.Have tried very hard on lots of websites to buy the:Canon i250 bubble jet printer,but no one have one 4 sale,not even a second one.

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