Digital Photography Now Printer Reviews

3-part series: Photo ink-jets laid bare

28th November - 2001
By Ian Burley

Part 2: The truth about photo ink-jet print quality:

 

 

 

 

Jump to:
  • Side by side testing
  • The qualities of a print
  • Source images
  • Presenting the results
  • The results printer by printer
  • Ink-jet printer limitations
  • Conclusions

    • Test summaries - printer by printer:

  • HP psc-950
  • Canon S800
  • Epson Stylus Photo 895
  • Lexmark Z43
     

    •  


    In part 2 of our Photo Ink-Jet Printers Laid Bare series, we turn our attention to photo print quality. We have dozens of colourful images to help you decide which printer delivers the best for your needs.

    All the leading printer manufactures consistently claim that their photo print quality is better than the rest. Indeed, the four leading makes we are testing here, HP, Canon, Epson and Lexmark, have each demonstrated their products versus their rivals to journalists, like me.

    I usually treat these workshops with a degree of scepticism. One manufacturer admitted, for example, that a test picture they were using to demonstrate print quality had been taken on a large format camera and carefully digitised and adjusted to show off its printer models to the best effect.

    That tactic is not totally out of order as it does indicate what you can achieve if you have a great image to start with, but it doesn’t help when you’re trying to decide on an imminent printer purchase.

    While we continue to be impressed with the great strides the manufacturers make with the development of ink-jet technology, there are some limitations that we have highlighted here.

    Side by side testing

    Our solution was to test a selection of printers side by side, using the same source image files. Once again, those four printers are HP’s psc-950 all in one printer/scanner/copier and fax, which is specially kitted out to print photos from memory cards as well as via a host PC, Canon’s S-800 Photo printer, Epson’s Stylus 895 Photo – also designed to print photos from memory cards or via a PC and, finally, Lexmark’s Z43.

    The qualities of a print

    We’ve broken down the attributes of a colour print into six headings:

    1. Colour – Here we compare the outputs of each printer and look for colour dominance, casts and balance. We also electronically tested the colour range (gamut) of each printer using a Gretag digital colour profile test rig. Click here to see larger side by side comparisons of each gamut result:
    2. Grain – Ink-jet printers construct an image by laying down millions of microscopic and multi-coloured dots. The size of these dots and the way in which they are combined on the paper goes a long way in determining how clear the image is and how realistic it will appear in photographic terms. It will also determine how sharp the image will be.
    3. Sharpness - Great colour and an absence of grain is one thing, but if that’s at the cost of image detail, you’ll want to know about it.
    4. Consistency – Ink-jet printers are vulnerable to blocked jet nozzles that can cause banding. Accuracy in print head alignment is another factor. We also look for consistency of print quality across the page. We also wanted to know how well each printer fared when using third party photo paper.
    5. Finish – All our tests were carried out using (where possible) recommended best quality glossy finish photo paper. We recorded how well the paper absorbed the ink, how the gloss finish of the paper was affected and how durable the finish was.
    6. Second opinions – Finally, we asked a panel of people to rate the output from each printer.

    Source images

    Click one of the the thumbnails below to see larger side by side comparisons of each test image:

     

    Source images include a 3 megapixel digital camera image of some tropical flowers, taken using HP’s new Photosmart C715  and a 4 megapixel image of my 5 year old daughter, Elizabeth, taken using an Olympus Camedia E-10 with flash for backlight compensation. We also zoomed in on a high resolution print featuring an eye in one image to examine detail quality.

    Each image was printed on the best or recommended A4 glossy media for respective printers. The print size was 7.5 inches wide along the shorter side (10x7.5 inches for the full frame 1:3/4 aspect ratio digital camera images). Each image was then evaluated under different lighting conditions.

    Printer driver settings were set to defaults for best quality printing on the recommended glossy paper. No other adjustments were made.

    For reproduction in this Web-based feature, the prints were re-scanned using a HP ScanJet 5470 flat bed scanner. A fifth sample image was produced by scanning a model’s eye in one of the pictures at 2400dpi.

    Presenting the results

    A Web browser is not an ideal medium with which to present print quality results! I’m open to suggestions as to how to improve the presentation of results, but inevitably there is a compromise.

    Luckily, the Gretag colour profiling system produces nice charts. For the actual test images, however, we have reproduced the test file originals to fit Web pages sensibly, along side similarly sized scanned reproductions of the printed version of each image, using the HP ScanJet 5470 scanner.

    Zooming in
    All reproduced images were sharpened slightly to bring out detail or optimise the general image quality for Web page display. However, all sharpening was applied equally for each image and no adjustment to colour balance was made.

    Our advice is that the textual description of the results should be balanced by the images displayed on each results page.

    Test summaries - printer by printer:

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