Multifunction Inkjet Printers: Are You Ready for a Printer that Does More?

Text Printing

Where inkjet printers are often dedicated to photos, multifunction printers are primarily called on to print text and prove themselves as legitimate alternatives to laser printers. The results we got in this area show a lot more disparities than appeared for photo-quality printing.

We ran three types of tests, printing text in 2, 10, and 72-point font sizes. For 2-point text, one model stood out: the Pixma MP780. Despite their small size, all the characters were perfectly legible. The two HP multifunctions did fairly well, though the PSC 2355's results were a little faint. On the other hand, we were disappointed in the performance of the two Epson models, which had trouble producing anything legible in a 2-point font size. The same was true of the Dell AIO 962, which, despite its intended orientation towards office applications, did poorly with very small text. As for the Brother DCP-110C, it showed dottiness that may be tolerable above 10-point size, but is unacceptable in smaller sizes. And with the Lexmark, the result looks more like hieroglyphics than the English alphabet! In the larger sizes, the Pixma MP780, thanks to its use of two black-ink cartridges for superior text printing, was still the best.