Product Reviews

In among the throng of super-powered high-resolution photo-capable colour printers, it's nice to see something that stands out from the crowd. Like previous printers in the range, Alps' latest MD-1300 - the follow-up to the 2300 (reviewed issue 34, p148) - uses a dry printing process as opposed to the wet ink favoured by most manufacturers. The cartridges, which look and work rather like audio cassettes, hold solid ink on a plastic tape wound around two spools. To create the page image, the application of heat melts ink from the tape onto the page.

However, the nature of the Alps printing mechanism means only one cartridge can be used at a time, so a colour page is printed in several passes - one for each colour. There are benefits to this approach, the most important being if one colour runs out you need only replace that cartridge rather than waste unused ink in a combined cartridge.

The disadvantage with this method of printing is that it hits print speed heavily. The first thing you'll notice about the MD-1300 is that it's very slow by comparison to today's top colour inkjets from Epson, Hewlett-Packard and Lexmark. Simple black text pages print at just under 1ppm (pages per minute) at any resolution. Add some business charts and the print time rises to around three minutes per page. Full-page photographs on the coated paper take a more acceptable six minutes, and on the top-quality paper between 15 and 20 minutes.

As for print quality, the MD-1300 is very much a mixed bag, based on the strengths and weaknesses of its solid ink process. It's capable of remarkable photographs and unique special ink effects, but it's poor to middling at plain paper photographs and documents combining text with business charts and graphics.

On plain paper, colour photographs and business graphics suffer from a speckled effect where the ink has been unable to bind to the surface of the paper. Previous Alps printers have suffered from this problem, so it appears to be a 'feature' of the print mechanism. For regular plain black text, however, the print quality is very sharp because there's none of the ink spatter you get with a conventional inkjet printer. Using Alps' High Grade paper solves the speckled effects and increases

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contrast immensely. Business charts and CorelDraw graphics improve hugely, too, and adding the optional finish cartridge in place of the black gives prints a glossy, professional look.

For the ultimate in photographic quality you need to switch to the special photo cartridges and use Alps' glossy photographic-quality paper. Once you've done that, you'll be rewarded with dot-free continuous tone photos. Skin tones are near perfect, and bright highlights are as well represented as with the Hewlett-Packard DeskJet 890C (reviewed issue 38, p168).

In fact, in side-by-side comparison, it's clear that the MD-1300 produces more realistic photographs than the best conventional inkjets, and it's not just the continuous tone advantage. Where most inkjets tend to produce rather vivid colours that look punchy and eye-catching, the MD-1300 manages much more natural-looking images. Our colour tests revealed that the basic colours - cyan, yellow and magenta - are less bright than with other inkjets. It's not perfect, as our test prints showed some slight colour striations, but these do little to distract from the overall quality of the photographs.

Where Alps' dry ink printers have an undoubted edge is in the area of special ink printing. The ability to print metallic colours - gold, silver, magenta and cyan are available - is unique in an affordable desktop printer. This opens several options which aren't available to inkjet printers, including prestigious-looking invitations and printing on coloured card, even using a white ink cartridge to make an undercoat.

Life with the MD-1300 can be tricky, however. You have to get used to keeping track of up to 12 individual cartridges and the relevant paper types. The review unit was supplied with manuals only in Adobe Acrobat format, and given the sheer number of print options this is a retrograde step compared to a printed manual. You'll also need to be aware that the MD-1300 isn't the most economic of printers when it comes to standard colour inkjet tasks. Printing text is especially expensive, costing around 7p per page. More graphics-intensive and photographic tasks are more reasonable, however: a print using the photographic inks at 100 per cent coverage costs £1.43 per A4 page, and 39p when using the standard colours. The relatively short cartridge life also means that long print runs will involve plenty of printer intervention.

The MD-1300, like its predecessor, is a printer for specific tasks. If you're going to be printing mainly big, colourful graphics and photographs, there's not much that can beat it in terms of quality at this price point. If text and business graphics occupy most of your printing time, however, you'd be better off buying Lexmark's excellent 5700 (reviewed issue 43, p156) or an HP 890C (reviewed issue 38, p168).