s someone who has used laser printers for more than 15 years, I've always looked at their less sophisticated cousins, inkjet printers, with a good deal of suspicion and disdain. Year after year, makers of inkjet printers have promised that their models were just as good and just as fast as laser printers. But each time I tried them out, I was disappointed - until now.
Today's generation of inkjet printers is nearly as good and nearly as fast as all but the most expensive laser printers. At the same time, you can do much more with a typical inkjet. As a result, I'm doing so many things with an inkjet printer that you just can't do with a laser printer that I am hard-pressed to recommend a laser to anyone except, perhaps, an author who needs to repeatedly print out drafts of a 400-page manuscript.
Over the past month I've been experimenting with two high-quality desktop printers: the Epson Stylus Color 640 and the Lexmark 5770 Photo Jetprinter.
Epson claims its printer has a resolution of 1440x720 dots per inch, and prints five pages per minute. It comes with two cartridges, one with black ink, the other with a mix of yellow, cyan, and magenta inks, allowing you to print color photographs with a four-color process. It is priced at $189.
Lexmark, meanwhile, claims a resolution of 1200x1200 and eight pages-per-minute print speed. It comes with a black cartridge and a color cartridge. You can also buy a photo cartridge, which replaces the black cartridge with black plus two colors, allowing you to print color photographs with a six-color process. The Lexmark also has slots on the side for flash cards for most digital cameras. This lets you print a picture without first bringing the images into your computer. This printer costs $315.
As the name implies, inkjet printers work by spraying a jet of ink at the paper. The ink comes out of a nozzle that moves back and forth across each line. Laser printers, on the other hand, are based on xerography. A laser beam is used to control the placement of an electric charge on a metallic drum inside the printer. The charge then picks up tiny bits of toner, which are deposited onto the paper and then melted into place by a high-temperature heating element.
One reason I've always been incredulous about inkjet printers is that their specifications never match what I observe when I try them out. Consider speed. Unlike a laser printer, which prints at a fairly constant rate regardless of what is being printed, the performance of inkjets slows down when the page is text heavy. I tried printing out pages from a new book that I'm writing and found that the Epson would only print two pages per minute, while the Lexmark printed between three and four.
Those speeds go down considerably, of course, when you print a full-color page in photographic quality: expect to spend three to six minutes per page when you start stamping out copies of 8x10 photographs. And while these printers may have truly phenomenal clarity, the resolution quoted is the resolution for a single dot of color. In order to create a full-color photograph you need to blend many dots together to form each full-color pixel, making the perceived resolution somewhat less than is promised.
But when I set my moral outrage aside and look at the printouts from these devices, I am stunned. Although there are occasional horizontal streaks and smudges in the black-and-white text from dirt and dust on the print head, especially when you are printing on plain paper, it's pretty hard to distinguish the print of the Lexmark from the print of my Hewlett-Packard LaserJet 5P, which costs $800.
The Epson fares a little poorer in a side-by-side comparison test, but it's still completely usable for both business and personal correspondence. Put specially coated inkjet paper into these printers and they can actually turn the tables on the laser with print that is just as sharp, but with many tricks that a laser printer simply can't play.
Print a color photograph on glossy paper and you'll see an image that is nothing short of spectacular. Indeed, the only problem with printing photos with these printers is getting the digitized image in the first place: Anything that you download from the Web or snap with a low-resolution digital camera will look like so many pixels when you print it on 8x11 paper. If you are printing a JPEG file, a common standard for compressing images, be sure that you get one that is at least 200 kilobytes in size or you won't be happy with the results.
Now that I've got these printers connected to my computers, I'm discovering lots of other uses for printing with color. When I'm traveling someplace new, I'll get a map from the Internet and print it for myself in full color. I've also started printing my letterhead and envelopes with a color logo and return address. I've even made a letterhead file with a Microsoft Word template file, so that I can print the letterhead along with my correspondence.
For more ideas, just go to a large stationery supply store or a computer store and you'll find an astonishingly wide variety of inkjet-ready office supplies. You can get labels for envelopes, floppy disks, CDROMs, and even Zip cartridges. There are overhead transparencies. There are more than a dozen grades of photo-quality glossy paper. And there are postcards and greeting cards that are inkjet-ready for your personal message.
The most important thing that I've learned on my printing endeavors is that you won't get good results unless you set the paper type before you go to print something. Setting the paper type is quite easy: in Windows 95, just hit the properties button before you hit the OK button on the Print panel. On a Mac you can hit a similar button, labeled Options.
Setting the paper type tells the printer how much ink to send through the nozzles and gives it instructions for manipulating the paper feed rollers. Set it wrong and you won't be happy with the results.
Technology writer Simson L. Garfinkel can be reached at plugged-in@simson.net.
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