Still the same four
The printer market has considerably changed during the past two years. The previous reigning line, A4 monofunctions, has completely collapsed and the market now is shared between two types of products, photo 4"x6" printers (approximately 10% of the market) and multifunctions (60%). What is a multifunction? It’s a standard inkjet printer with a flatbed scanner able to reproduce documents in color and black and white. Their success comes from the fact that the computer doesn´t have to be switched on to print a photo or make a black and white or color copy. Also, these multifunctions don’t necessarily mean a bulkier product than a standard A4 inkjet.
The manufacturers, however, are still the same with the usual Canon, Epson, HP and Lexmark. Two outsiders have also arrived to try and destabilize the market, Brother and Olivetti. They both have developed their own technology (which isn´t the case for Dell).
The Brother product doesn´t consume much ink, doesn´t have a standard design (it also includes a fax, so it complicates the control board) and its prints aren´t as sharp as those of the four leaders. They have nevertheless made progress in the last three years. This is particularly the case in photo mode.
Olivetti
Olivetti is back on the market after a brief attempt four or five years ago. We tested two of their printers and it was a catastrophe. They had to face the truth that their basic model (99€) and other one (159€) were far from the print rates and precision of competitor printers.
At some point they decided to suspend their effort, but finally Olivetti has decided to continue to sell them in the months to come. Maybe this is because they have no way out. Either way our first tests turned out terribly. Here is what a monochrome print looks like:
You are right if you see the ink drops on the surface. Costs aren´t an issue (cartridges are 30€ each), and there isn´t a problem if you want grey instead of black. Also, if you don’t mind a little ink on the back of pages.
If we stick with the obvious problems, the printer driver is the only one not to have a landscape mode. Olivetti´s multifunctions only work in Portrait, so you will have to turn your picture yourself before printing or use their photo printing tool. Olivetti explained to us that when the portrait mode is implemented in Windows, it causes problems. Maybe with their drivers, but with the others it works perfectly.
When you print pictures, two options are available:
optimum or
photography quality. Whatever you might want to pick, DON´T choose photo quality. An A4 print will take 35 minutes and the end result won´t be necessarily better (which means not great compared to competitor results) than the optimum mode.
Aware of these problems, Olivetti said that they have the intention of reviewing their drivers for those products on sale from January onwards as well as their firmware. Ok, but until this date, does this mean that they will sell products knowing they are faulty? This won´t change the size of ink drops, accuracy, which is much lower than average for office documents, and poor ergonomics (open system, the arm that we almost break each time we try to close the printer, the incomprehensible error message because Olivetti chose icons without text to avoid translations, it blinks, we sometimes see a countdown but we don´t really know what is happening, etc…). We give them the benefit of the doubt and maybe in January this printer will be much better, or at least eject less ink.
In the meantime, for everyone’s sake, leave this printer where it is, in its box in stores. Don´t fall for promotions, which will come when they liquidate stocks. At least, wait for the corrected version or even the 2nd generation (summer 2006).
Because of conception and/or quality differences between the Brother and Olivetti products and the Canon, Epson, HP and Lexmarks we decided not to fully include them here and just give you the printing quality for all tests. We are now back to the four normal manufacturers. We will go through these products in the pages to come.
Our expectations
We came to the conclusion in the
last survey that there was a relatively good quality for office and photo prints, sometimes borderline quality for scanning (except for Epson) and overall slowness.
In early 2005, only a few products featured color monitors. For photo prints in autonomous mode, their presence is almost indispensable.
We measured overall higher ink costs, so let´s hope that new cartridges will be more cost efficient.
Tests
Printers should nicely print text, graphics and photos. We tested all of these modes with all types of documents.
Texts are printed from OpenOffice 1.1.4, web pages from Firefox, and photos from Photoshop CS.
The modes tested (each time we evaluated print quality and speed ) and types of documents are:
Monochrome draft mode, with just a small "o" in the centre of the page, used to measure the maximum print rate of the engine
Monochrome draft, text, graphic picture extracts.
High quality, 20 photos 4” x 6” color
High quality, 2 photos 4” x 6” color without borders.
High quality, 2 photos 4” x 6” black and white.
High quality, 1 color test pattern.
High quality, 1 photo 8 1/2” x 11” color.
High quality, 1 photo 8 1/2” x 11” black and white.
In evaluating a printer we decided to prioritize color over black and white results. The weighting of color printings, its speed and quality, was given twice as much importance as monochrome documents and black and white photos.
We also evaluated the flatbed scanner and copy mode. The scanner was tested in 75, 300, 600 and 1200 dpi with and without detramage. We took into account the speed to digitalize and the result (color quality, accuracy).
The copy mode was evaluated in monochrome and color with one copy. We then made ten copies to evaluate the engine speed in color and black and white. The last test involved magnifying a 4”x6” picture to 8.5” x11”.
