HP Photosmart 7960 color ink jet printer

There's little doubt that the HP 7960 is an excellent printer for both B&W and color work. Of course it's the B&W feature that sets it apart from all other printers in its price range. While you can get special monochrome ink sets for some other printers (e.g. the Epson 1160), it's a significant amount of work to set up the system, it's not cheap and it means you have to dedicate a printer to B&W. With the HP 7960 you can print either in B&W or color at any time, you need no special drivers or profiles, and the price is not significantly higher than that of similar printers from other manufacturers.

While you can get good B&W images out of 6 color printers, it takes work, and even then you're not sure of absolute neutrality. If you're printing toned (sepia) images this isn't usually much of a problem, but if you want truly neutral B&W images it can be.

One possible limitation for some users is that the HP 7960 only prints up to 8.5" wide, so if you're interested in making 11x14 prints, you're out of luck. HP currently have no wide carriage version of this printer. Maximum settable paper length in the print options dialog is 14". I'm not sure if you can actually use longer paper by playing tricks, but if you intend to print panoramics on paper like the Epson 8.5" x 24" stock, it's something you'd need to research before buying the HP 7960.

Epson Stylus Photo R200

The Stylus Photo R200 comes in a sleek, nicely designed form: all burnished silver and black. With its paper trays attached, the printer takes up 18.5 x 19.0 x 11.9 inches. It weighs 11.4 pounds without its ink cartridges. Installation was painless and relatively quick, using the instruction sheet that came with the printer.

Once it was installed, I was quite satisfied with the device's general performance. Color photos produced by the printer were bright and vibrant, especially when published on specialized photo paper. As with many photo printers, the text printing was not quite as good; there were a few ragged edges noticeable in the lettering.

The printer offers up to 15ppm print speed in both black and color inks. I'm not sure how close to that speed it came in casual use; the device was a bit hesitant to start, especially after it had been sitting for a while, and thought it is quiet and makes little fuss, it did strike me as being slightly slower than others of its class.

The Stylus Photo R200 offers good quality photo printing for a relatively low price, and is a good buy for the amateur or family photographer. Add points if you do a lot of transferring to CD/DVD discs and want to give them a bit of pizzazz.

Canon CP-220 Compact Photo Printer

Canon have recently released two new printers, the CP-220 and CP-330. Both are small format portable dye-sub printers. The major difference is that the CP-330 has built in Li-ion battery power, while the CP-220 requires line power. Both can be operated from a 12v car battery via an adapter (CBA-CP100) which sells for around $90. The printers require 24v to operate, so the car battery adapter has to boost the voltage, which means you can't just kludge an adapter to a 12v supply just using the right cable and connectors.

If you need a portable printer, the CP-220 is an excellent choice. During the review no glitches occurred and the prints were generally of high quality. The prints are waterproof and fingerprint resistant which is something that may be very useful if you're printing pictures at an event (a party for example), plus they can be sent through the mail as postcards. The only drawback to this portable printer is that it does need AC power to operate. If you want to print somewhere away from available AC power, you'd either need the 12v car adapter (and extra $90), or you'd need to go for the battery powered CP-330 version which costs an extra $85 ($255 vs. $170). Prints are reasonably priced at around $0.50 each if you buy the 36 print kit ($18) or closer to $0.41 each if you buy the 108 print kit ($45). This is more than online prints would cost, but comparable to the cost of prints from some 1hr photo stores.

HP Designjet 4000 Large-format Printer

The HP Designjet 4000 large-format printer offers high-speed color and black-and-white printing up to 42" wide, as well as a wealth of beneficial features. Perhaps one of the most useful features is the HP Embedded Print Server. Using a standard Web browser on a network computer, users can simply enter the numeric IP address for the embedded server for driverless file submission, queue management, preview, error notification and supplies and printer status. Images that have been processed for printing can be stored on the Designjet 4000's 40GB hard disk for additional printing later without having to set up the print job again and wait for rasterization. This innovation is extremely useful and saves time, energy and money by letting anyone on the network access essential printing information. The printer also comes with an embedded processor for simultaneous printing and processing.

The HP Designjet 4000 uses a pair of staggered print heads (HP Double Swath technology) for a wider print swath and a higher firing frequency, producing faster printing times. I tested two vector drawings at D-size plots (24"x36"). A 3D line-art image of the Discovery spacecraft from the movie 2001, a file 2,583KB in size, printed using HPGL/2 in 1 minute, 35 seconds, including RIP time and drying. The Tasei Detail Plan, a sample 2D AutoCAD drawing (309KB), printed using HPGL/2 in 1 minute, 50 seconds, again including RIP time and drying. Finally, I printed a TIFF image (3008x2000 pixels) from a Nikon D70 6MP camera at D-size (24"x36"), which required 10 minutes total in normal mode—6 minutes, 45 seconds just to RIP the file to the printer, and then 3 minutes, 15 seconds to print. The rated print speed for the HP Designjet 4000 is 93 square meters or 1,000 square feet per hour. The speeds for our tests were quite good.

Samsung ML-1210 Laser Printer

The first generation, last year's Samsung ML-4500, was rated at 8 pages per minute (ppm) and had only 2MB of onboard memory and a parallel port. Its same-price successor, the ML-1210, delivers 12 ppm, an 8MB buffer, and both parallel and USB ports, so you won't even need a switch box to pair it with an ink-jet.

Stickers aside, the Samsung is downright cute -- a chunky little thing that takes only a 14-inch square space on your desk, and makes a typical but not annoyingly loud laser whine while printing (it's almost inaudible at idle). A near-vertical tray at the rear holds up to 150 sheets of paper, which normally make a U-turn through the printer to rest against an artist's-palette plastic stand at the front (with page 1 conveniently on top of the pile when you remove it). Flipping a lever at the front opens a face-up output slot, useful for routing envelopes or other stock from the manual-feed tray just forward of the main paper bin; we experienced only one jam (an envelope) in three days' testing.

Physical setup takes under a minute. The parallel and USB ports and AC plug are at the left rear, the power switch at the right rear. If you've read about low-cost lasers with messy separate drums and toner cartridges, you can relax; the Samsung's one-piece, slide-in cartridge is nearly goof-proof (although you're supposed to install it right after opening its bag, not leave it exposed to light for long).

As for performance, the littlest laser held its own with our big corporate office model (if you don't mind the lack of a network server). Ink-jets are quicker to spit out the first page of a print job -- the ML-1210 took from 10 seconds for a short text memo to 25 seconds for the cover of its Acrobat manual -- but once running, the Samsung chugged away at or close to its rated 12 ppm: a six-page text document took 40 seconds, while 50 pages of mixed text and graphics took four minutes and 50 seconds.

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