Ten... all-in-one inkjet photo printers Most inkjet all-in-ones are capable of printing passable photos, but some are geared up specifically with this in mind and feature memory card slots, high resolution printheads and wireless connectivity for printing from mobile devices. Some even have direct-print to DVDs and CDs as well as scanning from slides and negatives …
Apart from the fancy pop-up LCD displays (are they needed when you've probably previewed the pic on a phone/camera/tablet/desktop already?), what's the difference between an colour inkjet photo printer and a "normal" colour inkjet printer?
It might have been nice to incude a few "non-photo" colour inkjets in the review, load them up with photo paper and see what sort of job they do. With the price of photo paper and inkjet cartridges already very high, I've got to question spending anything more than 100 quid on any sort of inkjet printer.
Me? I've got an HP colour all-in-one inkjet printer, but no somewhat pointless colour pop-up LCD on it. Price? 25 quid directly from hp.com - throw in some photo paper and it does a good enough job at printing photos. No printer here costs under 80 quid, the difference of which could go on buying a reasonable number of cartridges and photo paper.
Canon Pixma MG2155 for £28 from Costco UK a couple of months back, and they still have them in stock for approx £33. This has everything except the colour pop up screen and WiFi, otherwise it is an amazing machine for the money. I cannot seem to find any reference to the MG2155 on the internet, but you can easily find it if you search for the 100% identical MG2150.
License to print money...
here, have another inkjet printer..
We'll sell you a few droplets of ink every month into eternity...
And if you don't print much and save your ink, we'll sell you even more, cause if you don't use it, the cartridge will just dry out on its own...
Fabulous!
The differences are explained right at the start of the article. A photo printer generally has more than 4 inks, some offer CD/DVD printing and some have negative/slide scanners.
The truth of all this though is that printing photos at home is a waste of time and money. Online photo printing services can have the pictures out to you next day and they'll be better quality and cheaper than you can possibly achieve at home.
When my current printer dies or the ink becomes hard to find I'll be getting myself a laser, probably black and white, and all my photo printing will be done online.
I agree, though I do keep a very cheap Epson scanner/printer for the rare occasions when I have to have a copy of something straight away (also kids don't have the patience to wait for a new Thomas the tank engine poster or similar). Funnily enough I have never required a built-in screen. I get the impression those kind of devices are mainly aimed at people who don't actually want to use a computer at all (or shouldn't).
Can you tell me which offline photo printing service you use please? I tried using Boots (who subbed out to another service) two years ago and I was not impressed by the incorrect hue rendering on most of my close-up pics of flowers.
(Such as pale green becoming pale yellow, strong yellows having a definite orange tint, etc). I did tick the box that said 'no auto-correction'.
I have a fantastic close-up of a bumble bee feeding on the edge of a sunflower and the only way I've got reasonable colour rendition is to print it on my cheapo Dell laser colour printer (which has other photo-quality deficiencies).
If you're price conscious (as you should be), then you'd be crazy to compare prices of the printers themselves and not spend at least twice the time comparing the cost of the ink. If you actually use a printer, the cost of the ink will swamp out the price of the printer itself several times over.
And Reg Hardware is less than helpful:
Cost per page: Brother printers "as low as Kodak"; Kodak ESP "no lower than Brother"; Kodak Hero "Lowest" @4.1p
Print Quality: Brother - "ragged?"; Kodak ESP "better than Brother"; Kodak Hero "the same on all papers"
Fortunately you can get the info on the Kodak ESP 3.2 from from http://www.reghardware.com/2012/07/07/review_ten_budget_inkjet_all_in_one_printers/
As always, a summary table would be helpful (And would make recursion obvious)
Being a photographer who likes to post process a lot I sometimes have weird crops etc. I like to control how these are printed and how accurate they are in colour saturation and hue etc. Most print services don't offer much more than size and borderless or matt or glossy.
Probably not useful for the over-the-pond group, but I use fractureme.com. It's a stupid name, but they print on glass and apply a backing (or not) of your choice. I've done a dozen or so, and they seem to respect how you want your colors & saturation. If I want it quickly (or poster-size) I'm lucky enough to have an independent print shop a couple blocks away.
So do any of these all-in-one POS work when one part craps out? Friends have various brands, and they do stupid shit like refusing to scan or fax when it's low on ink, or refusing to print if the scanner part develops a mechanical issue.
Why do you recommed HP inkjets? I have a previous incarnation of the photosmart and it gives ink cartridge low and empty messages within a year after only 25 prints (probalbly mostly status pages) So the true cost per pages is much higher than the couple of pennies. Every time you put it on (not often) it squirts ink down the drain.
I recommend a black and white (Kyocera or Samsung) laser and an online service for anything photo.
A laser printer in the home, pumping out toner clouds to breathe in? Hm.
Besides which any original toner/drum cartridge will typically cost as much as about three inkjet printers put together.
Some inkjets (such as HPs with disposable printhead cartridges), are very hackable in the sense of diy injecting of ink into cartridges (although do check before buying that the model you're looking at fits in that category). I agree and sympathise with anyone like you who says they're very expensive if you use original supplies. The answer is: don't.
I read the review and can't see why anyone would spend the extra, I did own a HP Enterprise wireless printer (£50 on sale in Tesco last year). But couldn't find any print cartitridges for it, during the mad search I came accross the Epson Stylus SX435W for £45 in Sainsbury's.
It uses WIFI to connect to your router and sets up a print server, so any machine can connect in your house network without needing complicated drivers (HP and your 100mb windows driver!).
The scanner detects multiple images and will scan them separately (since I am scanning in my photo collection this is invaluable). The scanner maxes out at 500 dpi and windows 7 finds the driver automatically.
It has a little LCD screen allowing you to perform setup, maintain, photocopy, scan & print operations. There is also a SD card slot for those inclined.
The ink cartridges are separate and a full pack costs £27 in Tesco and the form factor is tiny (smallest all in one I have ever seen) and it does only take between 50 - 100 pages at a time. I'm also not certain about the photo printing quality because I have only printed documents.
All that for £45, why would you spend £300? If your working in an office you won't be looking at simple inkjets unless your a small business and frankly if your worried about queues forming due to slow printing times, you could by 6 of these for the cost of one of the reviewed ones.
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