What is the Best Photo Printer?

Finding the best photo printer seems to get harder all the time. Canon, Epson and Hewlett Packard (HP) all produce color ink printers designed to provide high-quality photo prints. The Canon PIXMA iP5000, the HP 8150 and the Epson Stylus Photo R320 all have a list price of under $200 and can be used with both the Windows and Macintosh operating systems.

The Canon PIXMA iP5000 printer is the smallest of the three photo printers. With a droplet size of only 1 picoliter, the iP5000 prints dots half the size of previous Canon photo printers. It has two paper trays. With its duplex printing capability, it prints on both sides of the paper. Canon has developed a new two-sided photographic paper, which takes full advantage of this printer’s capability.

Both the HP 8150 and Epson Stylus Photo R320 printers allow you to edit and print your photos without using your printer. Simply, plug in your memory card and use the LCD control panel and knobs to edit your images. Without using your computer, you can remove red-eye, crop, change color brightness and select the page and formatting.  Although you can make adjustments to your photos without your printer, the computer software is much better at fine-tuning your colors and contrasts.

The HP 8150 has two paper trays and the Epson R320 has one. The Epson is the only one of the three photo printers that will allow you to print directly onto CDs and DVDs. 

Now lets look at the bottom line, which is the quality of the photos. All three photo printers produce excellent output from your typical business applications such as word processing and spreadsheets. For text printing, the HP produces the better, darker print. The Canon iP5000 is the fastest printer while Epson is the slowest.

Both the Epson and Canon printers produce outstanding photo printing quality, while the HP is quite good. However, the transition between colors is not as good with the HP. Perhaps it is because the HP utilizes two cartridges while both the Canon and Epson photo printers use six cartridges. The Canon and Epson are more cost effective, because of the multiple printer cartridges. You must replace the tri-color HP cartridge when one color runs out. 

The HP printer was fastest when printing a 4x6 color photo and the Canon was the fastest with an 8x10 color print. In both sizes of color photos, the Epson was the slowest.

All three companies claim long life span and improved photo fading resistance. However, if you gently wipe the images with a moistened tissue after they have dried, you may be surprised to find that the HP prints can be totally destroyed. Since the Canon and Epson photo printers avoided this fatal flaw, you would be better off to compare these two photo printers for your best photo printing results.

About The Author:

Larry Andrew is an educational consultant, author and publisher of www.ez-printer-ink.com. Purchasing printer ink, toner and inkjet cartridges on line should be fast, convenient and cost-effective.

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