Group test: Photo printers

It’s now possible to pick up a photo-quality printer for under £100. We show you what to look out for

Now that the digital era is well and truly upon us, there’s no reason to traipse to the local photo lab to turn Christmas holiday snaps into a set of prints. For digital camera owners, a great gift to receive is a photo-quality printer that can produce great-looking prints from the comfort of your home.

Home printing offers a number of benefits, the most obvious being that it puts the user in charge of what’s printed, as well as when and how to print. Buying a photo printer won’t set you back an arm and a leg, either. For standard home usage, there’s little point in going much over the £100 mark, since this kind of cash buys a device capable of excellent-quality, long-lasting prints.

Read on to find out what considerations you need to make before heading to the shops and then read our reviews of how six of the latest photo printers.

Types of printer
Photo-quality printers used to be giant heaps of grey plastic that hogged valuable space on a table. The larger, desk-bound variety still exists, but a new breed of portable photo printers has emerged that enable you to print photos almost as soon as you take them. Desktop printers are good, however, if you want an all-rounder (to print text documents as well as photos), since most portables can only print onto small, postcard-sized paper.

Most printers – either the desktop or portable kind – use inkjet technology. In basic terms, inkjet printers use cartridges of coloured ink, squirting tiny blobs of the liquid onto paper to make up a whole image. Generally, laser technology isn’t really used for home printing, but some portable printers now use thermal-printing techniques such as dye-sublimation (see the Canon Selphy CP720). This uses heat to transfer colours from a ribbon to special paper.

With one exception (the Canon Pixma MP510), we won’t be looking at printers that come as part of a multifunction device (those with scanner, copier and sometimes even fax machine functions built in). For casual users, these multifunction devices can be quite handy, but most are unsuitable for true photo-quality printing.

Resolution
In the good old days, the first thing you’d look for in a photo printer would be its output resolution – that’s to say the number of dots per inch (dpi) that make up the image on the printed page. Resolution isn’t the be all and end all of print quality, however, and there are several other factors involved – not least the type of paper you use on which to print.

These days, resolution has pretty much reached a plateau and all those confusing numbers are, by and large, irrelevant. Manufacturers usually label their products photo printers if they’re capable of high enough print resolutions for photo quality output. That said, it’s always worth double-checking that a printer’s resolution is above 2400x1200dpi.

Connections
The most obvious connection to look out for is a USB port. Most printers should have at least one of these for connecting the device to a computer. Some will feature a separate USB socket for connecting a digital camera directly. If your digital camera is Pictbridge-compatible, you may be able to send photos to the printer without using a PC.

More and more printers also come with built-in multi-format memory card readers, which allow you to pop out the card from your camera and put it straight into the printer, once again removing the need for a PC. Many printers combine these direct connections with an LCD screen for choosing the snaps you want to print and sometimes even allowing for minor editing tasks, such as cropping. This is particularly useful for portable printing.

Other connection types include wireless options, such as infrared, Bluetooth and Wifi. Few budget printers feature wireless connections as standard but many – including most of those reviewed below – can have Bluetooth added at a later stage.

Print speed
Speed can be a factor when choosing a printer, but this is generally more of a concern for those printing a large number of documents. If you happen to be a particularly busy person who needs their photos in a hurry, then check out the page-per-minute estimations specified by the manufacturer before buying.

It’s fairly difficult to compare these, however, as manufacturers tend to measure the speed of their devices slightly differently. Besides, manufacturers’ claimed estimates should be taken with a large pinch of salt most of the time. Of all the printers in this feature, for instance, only one of them gave us similar photo-printing speeds in our tests to those advertised.

Running costs
If there’s one area of printing that causes more consternation than any other, it’s the subject of the ongoing running costs. The printer itself may only cost about £100, but a small one-off payment can sometimes be tempered by heavy outgoings when it comes to the consumables required to keep the device running.

With inkjet printers, both the type of ink used and the paper you print on are important to the overall picture quality of the finished printout – this is particularly true when it comes to photos. For the very best results, you’ll almost certainly need to use the manufacturer’s own premium photo paper and replace ink cartridges when instructed – and this can get expensive.

The manufacturer may quote cost-per-page estimates but, as with print speeds, these are not always true reflections of how much it will cost to print in the real world. As a general rule, however, a printer that costs more than 45p per 6x4in print is likely to prove uneconomical in the long run.

In any case, there are a few pointers that can ensure the purchased printer doesn’t turn out to be too expensive to run. For example, check the cost of ink and paper before buying and compare them with those of other printers. Printers that use separate ink tanks for individual colours can also help cut down on wastage, as each colour cartridge is only replaced when necessary.

Other considerations
Some printers come complete with a useful selection of software, including applications for printing, organising and editing photos. These are usually little more than added bonuses, though, as such software can always be obtained separately if needs be.

Similarly, it’s quite difficult to tell how easy a printer is to use until you’ve actually got it home and are faced with physically setting it up and getting it to work. As a rule of thumb, the more whizzy features the printer comes with, the more fiddly it is to use.

Fading fears
A photo can capture a moment in time forever – or can it? One of the recent concerns relating to photo prints is how long they actually last before showing signs of fading.

Printer manufacturers have gone to great pains to come up with techniques to combat the natural signs of aging, and you’ll usually find that Canon, Epson, HP and Lexmark all quote different figures for ‘permanence’.

Caveats usually come attached to the number of years a photo is supposed to last. If a manufacturer claims its prints will still be around in 200 years’ time, for example, they’ll usually need to be protected by something like a photo album or UV-proof glass to go the distance. Since there aren’t many of us likely to last that long ourselves, it could be argued that this point is relatively academic.

What this issue does highlight, however, is the importance of hanging onto digital negatives – the original, unedited Jpeg files that the digital camera produces. Keep these safe and back them up wherever possible, so you can always print them out again if necessary. For more information on research into fading photo prints, visit www.wilhelm-research.com.

This article is part of a group test of photo printers.

See also:
Canon Pixma MP510
Canon Selphy CP720
Epson Picturemate PM240
Epson Stylus Photo R265
HP Photosmart D7160
Lexmark P350

A table of features can be found via the attached pdf above.