In Living Color: 8 New Inkjet Printers Put to the Test

High-Quality Printing, A4 Color Photo

It's no surprise that this is the test that shows the widest disparities between models. The range covers a factor of almost three, between the ultra-fast Canon Pixma 4000, and the Lexmark Z816, which operates at the speed of a turtle with arthritis. The average is quite high, in the neighborhood of 6 minutes. And unlike text mode, the slowest printers are not necessarily the ones that achieve the best-quality prints. We observed that while the Pixma range as a whole is very fast, Epson stays in the race with the Stylus Photo R300, which makes up for its poor results for color printing combining text and images.

Note that in order to magnify the differences between printers, we chose not to print a small 4x6" photo, even though this size will be the one most often used by owners of inkjet printers,.