Group test: Photo printers

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.

Like this story? Spread the news by clicking below:

 del.icio.us     Digg this     reddit!