Product Reviews

Colour was once an expensive commodity. Not so long ago you were glad if you could print red or yellow text every now and again. Nowadays, if it can't print photos, graphics and text in a ridiculously high resolution, it just doesn't cut it. Alps latest colour printer, the MD-1000, aims to do all this for a low price, and is targeted at the home market, currently dominated by Epson's Stylus 400 and 600 (reviewed issue 33, p124) printers.

The MD-1000's dark grey, blue and terracotta colour scheme, matt finish, clean lines and designer 100-sheet capacity input tray makes a refreshing change from the unoriginal, standard beige boxes. A couple of annoyances spoil things, however. Most irritating is the lack of output tray, so any space saving to be gained from the printer's relatively compact footprint of 450 « 264mm is wasted, as you'll need to leave enough desk space for output to rest on. Less irritating is the flimsy nature of the front panel, which doesn't look like it could stand up to much interference at infantile hands.

Installation, however, was childishly simple. After connecting the printer using a standard parallel cable which we had to supply, Windows 95 detected it with no trouble, after which it was a simple matter of loading the driver from the supplied disk.

The cartridge and print head arrangement reveals that the MD-1000 uses a very similar print engine to the MD-2010 (reviewed issue 32, p152). Four single-colour tape cartridges sit side by side inside the front flap and are grabbed in sequence by the print head. Like other Alps printers using the Microdry printing system, it prints each page one colour at a time, pulling the paper back through the paper path while the print head swaps to the next cartridge.

Alps printers are unique in offering metallic cartridges for snazzy text and artistic effects, and the MD-1000 can also print with white ink on a black background. The major difference between this printer and the MD-2010, however, is the new finish cartridge (£6.80 for two), which can be used instead of the black to apply a glossy lacquer

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on top of graphics and photographic output.

This has the desirable effect of making images, especially graphic art, charts and tables, look extremely snappy. In this configuration, the MD-1000 uses a combination of the three colours to achieve black. Whereas most inkjets that do this tend to end up producing something more akin to the colour of dried blood, it's difficult to tell the difference between true and composite blacks produced by the Alps.

Even without the finish facility to improve the appearance of prints, the MD-1000 is a highly competent colour printer. Its resolution of 600 « 600dpi on plain and Alps' high-grade media (£9.10 for 200 sheets of A4) captures the finest of details and reproduces photographs at magazine-like quality. You can push the resolution even higher - to 1,200 « 600 - if you use special photographic paper, and the results are impressive. Fills and fades are smooth, and even photographic colour matching, a perennial problem for inkjet printers of this type, is realistic and balanced, although vibrancy is sacrificed. Text quality, too, is as good as any laser printer.

What this printer won't do, though, is print on plain paper. I managed to get excellent results using Alps own high-grade laser paper, and output on good-quality 90g/m2 inkjet paper was up to the same standard. But when I tried using some 80g/m2 copier paper, the output was horribly speckled and patchy. This problem afflicts Alps' whole range of Microdry printers, and although other inkjets aren't at their best when using this type of paper, they usually produce something better than this.

Another small thing that might just affect your purchase is speed, or rather the lack of it. If you've got no patience, or simply not enough time to wait an average of nine minutes for a five-page text document to print, this is printer is probably not for you. Printing full-colour images is relatively quick by comparison, but even the five minutes and 15 seconds it took to print a standard snapshot-sized photo is slow.

The Alps MD-1000's price tag of £254 is very reasonable considering the print quality and is close to Epson's Stylus Colour 600. It won't cost you an arm and a leg to run either. To give you an idea, a full A4 highest quality photographic print, including paper, will set you back just 62p on average, and a page of text, at five per cent coverage, is 2.4p per page (ink only).

The Alps MD-1000 is a good-value printer capable of superb quality output across the board if you use the right paper. It is slow, however, so if you've got a little more cash to spare, I'd advise you buy the A-listed Lexmark 7000 (reviewed issue 33, p156).