Bang for your buck: 4 Budget printers tested

Editor's Choice: Budget Printers

Editor's Choice: Canon i250 Bubble Jet Printer
Highly Commended: Epson Stylus C43UX

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

Our Editor's choice for budget printers was an extremely hard one to pick, as with every printer in our tests there were compromises to make and problems to be overcome. Our eventual choice, the Canon i250 has a fairly major one -- no output tray -- but excelled in print quality and especially in print speeds across all of our printing tests. It's also the cheapest unit to run by a good margin, something that's going to be quite important in the low-cost sector.

The Epson Stylus C43UX is an excellent unit when it comes to churning out quality prints, but is hobbled by some extremely slow print speeds -- we really can't recommend it as a photo printer, for example, unless you're very patient indeed. Its relatively low running costs and included USB cable, however, do make it a very good value unit.

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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.

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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.

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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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