Ink Jets

Mention personal printers and people generally think of ink jets, most of which are small enough to fit on a desk for personal use in your home or office. Apart from photo ink jets, which we'll cover in the Photo Printers section, we can define several subcategories: deadly-slow home printers (under $100), moderately fast midrange printers ($100 to $300), and near-laser-speed business ink jets ($300 to over $1,000). But all ink jets share some key features that may make this your technology of choice.

Ink jets are undeniably appealing for those on a tight budget. Prices start at less than $40, with only a few business-level ink jets costing more than $700—the starting point for color lasers. And ink jets that handle tabloid-size paper start at less than $500, which is thousands less than tabloid-size lasers cost.

Ink jets have one other clear advantage: high-quality color photo output. You can usually tell that the quality does not match even drugstore prints—but often only on very close inspection. Whatever the price, today's ink jets show little difference in output quality. But more money will buy you more speed.

Performance has always been the Achilles' heel of ink jet printers. Manufacturers regularly make unrealistic speed claims, basing them on draft mode, which cuts corners on output quality. Even then, they are wildly optimistic compared with the results we've seen at PC Magazine Labs. At best, the claims indicate relative speeds among printers from the same manufacturer. So don't compare claimed ink jet speeds against those for laser printers, which really can print at close to their claimed speeds.

Another manufacturer claim you shouldn't take too seriously is resolution, which doesn't tell you everything you need to know about output quality. For example, you won't get laser-quality text and graphics from an ink jet, even though the ink jet offers the same or higher resolution, because the ink tends to spread, or wick, as the paper absorbs it.

You should consider total cost of ownership for any printer, and particularly for ink jets. Essentially, manufacturers give away the razor to sell the blades. The initial cost of a printer may be low, but continually feeding it ink and photo paper gets pricey.

To calculate total cost of ownership, consider how many pages you'll print over the printer's lifetime (about three years), then multiply the total by the best estimate you can find for the printer's cost per page (usually available from the manufacturer, or from PC Magazine if we've reviewed the printer). The more you print, the more likely that the total cost will be higher for a bargain printer than for a more expensive one. (You can find an analysis of the true cost of printing at

Remember that if the printer uses a tricolor cartridge, you have to throw out the entire cartridge when any color runs out. That tends to make printers with separate-color ink cartridges less expensive to run.

Different printers also use different techniques for photos. Almost all printers use dithering to create the illusion of color, with your eye mixing the colors from many individual dots. Some use high resolution, with eight possible colors for each dot and plenty of dots in any given area on the page. Others get the same visual effect at a lower resolution by printing each dot in a greater range of colors and using fewer dots per square inch. HP, for example, says that at 300 dpi its PhotoREt IV can print 289 shades for each ink color, with a palette of more than 1.2 million colors for each dot. Higher resolutions yield fewer shades per ink color and fewer colors per dot.

Don't rely on the claimed resolution. Instead, try to see some photo samples before you buy. And although you can add network connections to most printers, the installation for most ink jets is cumbersome. The one notable exception is HP printers, which take advantage of the same easy installation routine that HP's network laser printers use.