Are High-End Ink Jet Printers Worth Your Money?

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Printing Text And Images In Standard Quality

Unlike laser models, that don't really show much of a performance difference between text and images, inkjet printers don't like to mix genres. As soon as you add graphics to a Word document, performance drops off sharply. The Pixma IP8500 did best in this department, maintaining a reasonable cadence in grayscale and in color. The Photosmart 8450 was fairly far behind and wasn't as comfortable as it was with text alone. As for the Stylus Photo R800, it also showed that it's intended above all for printing photos and not really anything else.

If you'll excuse the expression, it wasn't a photo finish (at least where speed is concerned). Canon's Pixma line is still in the lead and leaves its rivals in the dust. Just over 90 seconds for an A4 photo is really quite an astounding performance. It's true that Canon hasn't stinted on the technology, with printing heads that are capable of projecting 147 million ink droplets per second. The Epson Stylus Photo R800, though its time was still very good, was almost twice as slow. As for HP, they don't really seem to be concerned with the issue of printing speed in photo mode. We'd already noticed that with the less pricey models in the range - with some of them taking more than 10 minutes to produce an A4 photo -, and that held true for this top-of-the-line model.