By
LOU DOLINAR
Newsday
As the
personal computer grows cheaper and faster, what counts more
and more is what you attach to it. A 19-inch monitor is worth
more than a few extra megahertz. A cable modem gives greater
satisfaction than another 128 megabytes of RAM.
And a printer? Hey, that's the face your computer presents
to the rest of the world. A poor choice not only looks bad,
it can be slow, expensive, and frustrating to use.
COLOR INKJET PRINTERS
Well, OK, if you mostly surf the net, rarely print out anything
and do hardly any graphics at all, go for a cheap - $100 or
less - inkjet. I've actually seen some of these guys selling
for less than $50, which is not a whole lot more than the
replacement ink cartridges that go inside.
A couple of things to watch: Read the reviews carefully, because
you can get killed by the cost of ink cartridges. Our favorite
site, Cnet, recently looked at a handful of cheap printers
and came up with some pretty startling numbers: The best looking
cheapie, the Lexmark Z12 ($47 retail) will cost you 12.6 cents
per page of black text and 67 cents per color page on average.
The top-rated Canon S400 ($87 retail) costs 2.6 cents for
text page and 23 cents for color. Note that these are relative
numbers - a color photo or full-page graphic will use more
ink and thus cost more.
The other issue with some of these units is how they use ink
cartridges. With the Lexmark, if you want to print pure black,
you snap in a black cartridge. If you want to print color,
on the other hand, you take out the black and snap in a three-color
cartridge that contains cyan, magenta and yellow. What if
you're printing black and color? Well, it combines the cyan/magenta/yellow
to form black, which is expensive and doesn't give you a true
black.
The Canon unit, on the other hand, has four separate cartridges.
If you use a lot of yellow on one run of pages, you don't
waste the cyan and magenta in the same cartridge. That's one
of the reasons the per-page cost for the Canon is so low.
Speed is another issue. A cheap inkjet typically prints one
to two pages of text per minute. For graphics or for a photo,
you could easily be looking at a couple of minutes per page,
which is to say, they barely work. You can forget about printing
your own Christmas cards, like I do.
You need to spend a tad more than $100 to get decent performance
in an inkjet unit. For $150 to $400, there's a broader range
of choices.
You're mostly paying for greater print speed, three pages
or more per minute, as well as features like built-in networking
and duplexing, the ability to automatically print on both
sides of the paper.
It is dangerous to generalize about print quality with these
more expensive units. Most manufacturers, Epson being the
leading example, focus on resolution, e.g., the number of
dots the printer can lay down per inch. Hewlett-Packard, on
the other hand, uses a technique that applies more colors
to individual dots, with fewer dots. Without getting into
a lot of technical detail here, high-dpi printers tend to
smear and work better with coated or photo paper - both of
which can be expensive. The HP approach offers better images
on plain paper.
Specialty inkjet photo printers use six or seven ink colors
in their cartridges to get smoother tones. The nice thing
about this type of unit is that it can do double duty, albeit
at a slow speed, as a text printer as well. A couple of examples
of this genre: the Epson Stylus Photo 875DC ($275), which
accepts the memory cards of most cameras directly, and the
HP PhotoSmart P1000 (also $275).
The prices of all these printers are falling rapidly. As they
do, one type of inkjet printer is looking increasingly tempting:
the wide-carriage models. For around $400 and up, you can
get wide-carriage versions of popular units that produce high-quality
prints up to 11 by 17 inches - great for do-it-yourself posters
and artwork. About the only thing that keeps me from buying
one right now is that I know I'll want to spend another $500
or so for a high-quality digital camerato go with it.
PERSONAL LASER
Why would you want a personal laser when you could buy a color
printer for a lot less? Here's why: Lasers cost as little
as one-tenth as much per page to operate as an inkjet unit.
Lasers can produce multiple copies quicker than an inkjet,
usually at the rate of 8 or more pages per minute. And if
you're like me, involved in volunteer work, you'll appreciate
being able to run off 25 or 50 copies of a note or newsletter
in a hurry.
What I'd call a "real" laser printer incorporates a microprocessor
and memory. This allows it to create and internally store
the page you send it. Thus, it operates independently of the
PC. That's one reason it can run off copies so quickly - it
does not have to communicate with your computer after it loads
the first page. Some cheaper models skip the memory, use a
slow processor and rely on the computer's microprocessor to
do most of the work. The least expensive printers with built-in
memory, such as the Brother HL1240 or the NEC Superscript
($325-350 retail), have 2 megabytes of RAM, which you can
expand if you print a lot of graphics.
Because buying a laser presumes you're printing in volume,
paper handling is a big deal: You want a printer that will
load 100 or more sheets of paper, and possibly envelopes,
at the same time.
Lasers are usually rated at 600 dots per inch, seemingly less
crisp than the typical $100 inkjet, which can print up 1440
dpi. Don't sweat it. For text, 600 dpi is just fine, particularly
since laser toner has less propensity to smear and run than
ink. It also tends to be more water-resistant. You'd want
more resolution in a laser printer only if you want to print
photos.
If you have a Macintosh as well as a PC in your house, you
might want to spend a few extra bucks and get a laser printer
with the Postscript 3 page description language built in.
This not only maintains greater fidelity between what you
see on screen and what you print, it lets you attach the printer
to a local area network via any standard print server and
share it between Macs and PCs, something you can't do easily
with standard Mac print drivers. The best price I've seen
for this option is on the Xerox DocuPrint P1202, $375 retail.
MULTIFUNCTION
SYSTEMS
I've never been a big fan of units that combine printer,
scanner, fax, copier and bottle opener. They either cost
a fortune or end up compromising the quality of one or more
functions. If you have a good scanner and a good networked
printer, who needs a multifunction device?
My daughter Ann, it turns out. This past year, on a lark,
I picked up a reconditioned HP OfficeJet 600 for a mere
$99, a number you can probably match if you're willing to
troll auction sites like uBid. (The successor OfficeJet
710 can be had new for about $250.) It combines a cheap
inkjet printer (see above), a cheap sheet-fed scanner, etc.,
with really nifty software that lets you control all the
functions, rather simply, from your PC.
The part I ignored in denigrating the multis is that the
whole is greater than the sum of the parts - particularly
for Ann, a 12-year-old graphics wizard and Print Artist
aficionado. She's forever using it to ship photos and artwork
to friends via AOL, to run off holiday posters and cutouts,
generally having a ball. Heck, I've even used the built-in
scanner for optical character recognition. Best $99 I ever
spent on computer gear.
As with printers, these multifunction units come in two
flavors, inkjet and laser. Inkjets run around $250 to $300,
and the lasers go for $400 and up. Keep an eye on features
and whether they require computer support - my daughter's
gizmo will copy a black-and-white page even if the computer
is turned off, but it needs to have a turned-on PC to duplicate
a color page. If you're running a small organization, you're
best off with a laser unit that can run off lots of pages
in a hurry.
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