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COPYRIGHT 2005 VNU Business Media Europe
You can now buy inkjet colour printers for less than [pounds sterling]80 that can produce up to A4-format photo prints of astounding quality. Coupled with digital cameras, this means even the casual snapster can print photos at home. But should you use the printer manufacturer's own-brand photo paper or third-party options?
In this test we compare the options to see if you can save money or whether, as the printer manufacturers insist, it's a false economy to use third-party paper, as you will lose out on print quality. We're not covering the controversial issue of print fading in this group test, although we will be looking at this in a future edition. We tested using six popular, widely available low- and mid-priced inkjet printers.
Printer manufacturers don't make huge profits from selling printers, but they do with printer consumables. You realise this when you buy your first set of replacement, own-brand cartridges costing a large fraction of the printer cost.
Printer manufacturers respond to questions about the use of cheaper third-party consumables by saying they don't recommend them because they aren't selling you a printer, they are selling a complete printing system, where the printer driver, ink cartridges, printer and paper are all designed to produce the best-quality images possible with that group of components. Cynics sneer at this and we wanted to put these claims to the test.
Image quality and cost
We tested six brands of glossy photo paper against own-brand glossy photo paper from the three main manufacturers of colour inkjet printers - Canon, Epson and HP.
Where available, we used samples of the highest and lowest quality papers from both the printer manufacturers and the third-party paper suppliers. In some cases, where the bottom-of-the-range paper wasn't available, we used the next highest grade and found a clear difference even between the best- and next-best-quality papers. For example, there is a significant difference between the HP Premium Plus and HP Premium papers. In total, 17 papers were put to the test.
The help available to enable you to find the correct printer settings to use for each paper on each printer varied a lot (see the box 'Altering settings and using test images to get the best print results' on page 101).
Kodak provided the most support with its free Easyshare image-management software that incorporates the One-Touch printing utility, its online database of individual printer driver settings and even downloadable ICC colour profiles for its professional papers.
The Fujifilm and Jessops papers all included settings sheets, while the PC World, Jet Tec and Ryman papers did not. The instructions given in these sheets are fairly generic and not particularly detailed; for example, 'When using on HP printers, use the "Premium photo paper" selection with "best" print quality setting' - and they may not match exactly with the available options in current printer drivers.
Our test regime was intended to see what kind of results the average user could achieve without any specialist knowledge. It would have been an interesting exercise to see if any of our results with these papers could be improved, through either individual colour profiling or adjustment of the advanced settings in the print driver. However, this is very time consuming and would not be an option for most users.
Fujifilm
Fujifilm is one of the major photographic companies that have also been making inkjet papers for quite some time. Multijet Premium...
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