Printer????Which One?

[Panayotis]

Hi,

I would like to buy a new photo printer!
I have strically no idea ?
I need your experiences in HP, CANON and EPSON!
What do you think about ESPON 930? Good Value?

Thanks

Stephane
S30 and Underwater Pack

[Conk]

I'm quite happy with my epson 860.
When I shopped for a printer one of the things I considered was the cost of replacement ink.

[Theo]

Stephane,

I bought the HP 5550 6 weeks ago and have printed 35 wonderful 8 X 10s on Office Depot Premium Photo Paper ($.20\pg). Blew the socks off even a few avid 35mm fans! Most people couldn't believe they were taken with a digital camera (Canon A40) and printed at home, not a photo lab. Took an average of 3 minutes printing out the full color prints (1600 X 1200)-crisp-sharp-natural colors that showed more depth than my expensive 19" monitor could display. The price is great ($150) and at 4800 X 1200 dpi resolution, the ink consumption was reasonable!

Maybe I'm just blown away because of my newness to this art of photography and inexperience in the digital realm, but the print capability of the HP 5550 has been all I expected and more!

http://community.webshots.com/user/torretab

Good Luck,

Ted

[Jerry Vanderberg]

I have been delighted with the performance of the Canon S900 but I have no way to compare this one-on-one with the other printers mentioned.

[Maestro]

Most of today's Photo-realistic printers produce fantastic quality pictures if you use good paper. The differences are in speed and general solidity of the printer.

Things you need to make sure the printer has:
- Reasonable resoultion (better than 1200x600 dpi)
- 6 colour printing (Many have a 4 colour Photo cart.)
- USB connection

Other than that it's a matter of personal preference.. I myself have a Lexmark Z45 and find it produces great photo's as well. It may be a bit slow when printing photo's (6 mins for 280 dpi 8x10 photo), but it's cheap and produces excellent Black and white quality output as well.

[loki]

Depends on what you want to use it for, too. If you're printing nothing but pictures, I think that the Epson's have the best imaging output, but their black text output is horrible.

I bought an HP because the imaging output is almost as good as the Epson's, and the black text output is near laser quality.

[Denny]

canon s900 seems to have the most accurate colour and its very sharp
i would recommend all 3 of them
but I would get the epson ones because they're 1440dpi instead of 1200 although the 1200x4800 seems to be more resolution than the epson 5###x1440. The 4800 and 5### is just the verticale resolution so all it does is move the paper by more steps at a time. Same thing as the scanner true dpi vs software dpi.