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29
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Consumer Reports – Printers
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Inkjet printers have become the norm for home computers. They may be color photos nearly indistinguishable from photo-processing workshop, with banners, stickers, transparencies, T-shirt transfers, greeting cards. Many produce excellent black and white text. With some very good models for less than $ 200 inkjet printers are the vast majority of printers sold for home use.
Laser printers still have their place in the home office. Ifprinting pages and pages of text documents in black and white, you probably need quality, speed and low cost per copy of a laser printer.
Printers use a computer's processor and memory to process the data. The latest inkjet and laser printers are so fast partly because computers more powerful and has a memory much more than before.
What's available
The printer features a handful of established brands. Hewlett-PackardThe market leader. Other major brands include Brother, Canon, Epson, Lexmark.
The type of computer printer can serve depends on doors. Universal Serial Bus (USB), a printer attached to your Windows or Macintosh. Some models have a parallel port, the printer works with Windows computers. All these printers lack a serial port, which means it does not work with older Macs.
inkjet printers. Inkjet ink droplets used to formletters, graphics, and photos. Some printers have one cartridge that holds the cyan (greenish-blue), magenta, and yellow inks, and a second cartridge for the black ink. Others have an individual cartridge for each ink. For photos, many inkjets also have additional cartridges that contain lighter shades of cyan and magenta inks; some have added red, gray, blue, or green inks.
Most inkjets print at 2 1/2 to 11 pages per minute (ppm) for black-and-white text but are much slower for color photos, one half at 21 minutes, an 8×10 print it. The cost of printing a black page with an inkjet printer differs significantly from the model of a model varies from 3 to 7.5 cents. The price for printing a color 8×10 photo may vary from 80 cents to $ 1.50.
Price range: $ 80 to $ 700
Laser printers. It works much as simple as copying images of paper with the transfer of toner (powdered ink) to paper on an electrically charged drum. Processmade in black and white printing sharp text and graphics. Laser printers ink usually run, churning out black and white text with a speed of 12-18 ppm. White and white laser printers generally cost as much as midpriced inkjet, but is cheaper, the second largest laser cartridges, about $ 50 to $ 100, can print thousands of black and white on a page costs 4 cents to . Color Laser Printers are available. Price range: $ 150$ 1,000 (Black), $ 400 and up (color).
Major Features
Printers differ in the fineness of detail that can produce. The resolution, in dots per inch (dpi), is often regarded as the main measure of print quality. But there are other factors such as how the dot patterns are formed by software instructions of the printer driver, also count. In their default configuration, where they are normally called upon to play, inkjet printers currently on the market, a typicalresolution of 600×600 dpi. For color photos dpi can be increased. Some printers allow up to 5760 x1, 440 dpi printers. Laser for home use typically offer 600 or 1200 dpi. Color photo inkjet print on special paper in a place higher dpi can be easier shades of colors can produce, but the pressure may be significantly delayed.
Most have a printer ink monitor to warn if you are running out. generic ink cartridges are often less expensive, but most products are farfewer prints than the brand-name inks, so per-print costs may not be any lower. And print quality and fade-resistance may not be as good.
For double-sided printing, you can print the odd-numbered pages of a document first, then flip those pages over to print the even-numbered pages on a second pass through the printer. A few printers can automatically print on both sides, but doing so slows down printing.
HOW TO CHOOSE
Be skeptical about advertised speeds. Print speed depends on what you print and what quality, but the speed you see in ads are generally higher than it probably reached in normal use. You can not reliably compare speeds for different brands because each company uses their own methods of speed. We run the same test on all models, printing text pages and photos that match what you print. As a result, our assessment is realistic and can be compared with us.
Do not get hung upsolution. Print resolution, expressed in dots per inch, is another potential source of confusion. All things being equal, the points more ink on paper, more detailed photos. But dot size, shape and placement also affect quality, not just make a decision based on a decision.
Consider the cost of power and a price of printer. ink cartridges can cost a high price printer at a bad bargain in the long term. Look around for the best designprices but be wary of off-brands; we have found brand-name cartridges to have better print quality overall, and per-page costs are often comparable.
Glossy photo paper costs about 25 to 75 cents a sheet, so use plain paper for works in progress and save the good stuff for the final results. We’ve gotten the best results using the recommended brand of paper. You may be tempted to buy a cheaper brand, but bear in mind that lower-grade paper can reduce photo quality and may not be as lightfastness.
Decide whether you want to print photos without using a computer. Print without a computer saves an extra step and a bit 'of time. Features such as support memory cards, PictBridge support (a standard that can be a compatible camera can be connected directly to the printer) or a wireless interface are convenient. But if you print directly from camera to printer, you can compromise on what attracted you to digital photography in the first game, the ability totweak size, color, brightness, and other image attributes. And with a 4×6 printer, you give up the ability to print on larger media.
Weigh convenience features. Most printers make borderless prints like those from a photo developer. This matters most if you’re printing to the full size of the paper, as you might with 4×6-inch sheets. Otherwise you can trim the edges off.
If you plan to use 4×6-inch paper regularly, look for a printer with a 4×6-inch tray, which makes it easier to feed paper of this size. With these small sheets, though, the cost per photo may be higher than ganging up a few images on 81/2 x11-inch paper.
With some models, if you want to use the photo inks to get the best picture quality, you have to remove the black ink cartridge and replace it with the photo-ink cartridge. Then you have to replace the black for text or graphics. This can get tedious. Models that hold all the ink tanks simultaneously eliminate that hassle.
Consider connections. Printers with USB 2.0 ports are now fairly common. However, they don’t enable much faster print speeds than plain USB. All new computers and printers have either USB or USB 2.0 ports, both of which are compatible. Computers more than six years old may have only a parallel port.
Decide whether you need scanning and copying. A multifunction unit provides scanning and color copying while saving space. The downside is that multifunction units’ scanners may have lower resolution than the latest stand-alone scanners. Stand-alone scanners are best for handling negatives and slides. And if one part of the unit breaks, the whole unit must be repaired or replaced.
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