Lab

Photo inkjet printers

By printing your photos at home, you can take control of the result. If a picture doesn't work, you can crop it, adjust tone and brightness, or make other changes required to perfect the image. You don't have to wait for your pictures to return from the printers. Better yet, we've found it's cheaper to print A3 photos at home than order enlargements from an online print shop.

It's hard to choose between the many high-quality photo printers around. Photo quality is crucial, but features such as memory card readers, built-in screens and drivers with full-colour profiling can make a big difference to the usability of a printer and the results.

We've reviewed the latest photo printers, plus the best of those we've reviewed in the past year, starting from £61. Whether you want to produce art photos for framing or just make the most of family snaps, we'll help you to find the best choice for your budget.

We've looked at nine high-quality photo inkjets, each capable of producing prints you'll want to show your grandchildren in years to come. With the right paper and ink, a decent inkjet can print stunning photos that will last for generations.

To ensure the best results from your photo printer, it's advisable to use the manufacturer's own ink and paper, as they are designed to work together. Even when buying manufacturers' papers, quality can vary widely. For example, we found that HP's Premium Plus paper produced better-looking prints than the HP Advanced Glossy paper. There are several other things to look out for when choosing a photo printer. This buying guide will point you in the right direction.

On the dot

Inkjets create prints by placing thousands of tiny dots on every inch of the page. Minute droplets of ink are squirted on to the page through nozzles in the print heads as they pass across the paper. The most basic inkjets use a combination of three inks for photo printing: cyan, yellow and magenta. Dots of coloured ink are placed in close proximity to each other in various patterns to create the impression of additional colours, and small droplet sizes mean that each dot can be made up of multiple colours. Most of the printers here use additional inks, usually light cyan and light magenta, to create more subtle colour and shading.

Printers with higher resolutions, measured in dots per inch (dpi), can place more dots on the page. This generally leads to higher-quality images, although other factors such as droplet size also play a part. High resolutions are an indicator of good print quality, but don't guarantee it. We've described the results of our in-depth quality tests in each review.

Most consumer photo printers use dye-based inks. These semi-translucent water-soluble colours were traditionally cheaper and more vivid than pigmented inks, but also more prone to fading. Some printers use pigmented inks, which contain particles of solid colour suspended in a liquid. They dry faster and are more resistant to fading, but can be more expensive and less vivid. Some pigmented inks are also associated with a 'bronzing' effect, which can cause metallic reflections under some lights. Luckily, the high standard of modern inks means both dye and pigment inks can provide bright, affordable colour with excellent longevity.

Pigmented inks are often found in semi-professional A3+ printers. Epson's Stylus Photo R1900 and HP's Photosmart Pro B8850 use pigmented inks. The R1900 uses an additional gloss cartridge to avoid the slightly dull quality that can affect pigmented prints. Both include matt black cartridges for printing on fine art paper, as well as glossy black ink for photos. HP's B8850 also uses a light grey cartridge, which is ideal for black-and-white photos.

Watching the cost

Several of the printers here emphasise photo quality at the expense of standard document quality. Others, such as Canon's Pixma iP4500, produce high-quality photos and professional-looking documents. As well as our standard print speed tests, we performed timed A3 photo prints. You can see how the A3 printers performed in the reviews.

In addition to our usual A4 mono and colour document costs, we've calculated photo print costs for each printer where possible, including the price of both ink and paper. Most photo inkjets cost a little more to run than their more typical home or business counterparts. This is often due to the use of additional specialist inks, which tend to be more expensive.

Fortunately, print costs aren't too exorbitant. Printing a 6x4in photo at home is never going to be as economical as using an online printing service such as www.photobox.co.uk, but typical costs of 15 to 20 pence per print are reasonable, as home photo printing gives you full control over the photo as well as near-instant results. We were impressed to find that typical A3 photo print costs were lower than the price of an A3 enlargement from an online printing service.

Direct line

Many home photo printers can print directly from memory cards, USB drives and digital cameras with PictBridge support. The maximum direct-printing resolution is usually lower than the maximum resolution available when printing from your PC.

We don't recommend using direct printing for expensive A3 prints, as resolutions are often reduced and you don't get as much control over the final result as you would when printing from a PC. However, it's a useful feature for making quick copies and preview prints with a minimum of fuss. To print directly from memory cards, it's best to buy a printer with a large colour screen, such as HP's Photosmart D7460 or Epson's Stylus Photo R360. This allows you to crop and adjust images with some accuracy.

The printers produced photos of such quality that they were hard to fault. When buying a high-end photo printer you should look at samples of its output yourself, as many aspects of photo quality such as colour intensity are subjective.