Lab

Photo printers

Digital cameras make it easy and cheap to take as many photos as you want. To get the most from them, you also need an easy and affordable way to print them out. Photo printing is a standard capability of today's inkjets, but some are better at it than others. This month we rounded up seven printers that make photos a speciality, from a £27 budget model to a portable that you could take on holiday.

You don't necessarily have to choose the most expensive printer to get the best pictures. One of our favourite inkjets is Canon's PIXMA iP4500 (search for 147849 at www.computerbuyer.co.uk), at around £63. That's a general purpose A4 unit, as are three of those we've tested this time. There are also dedicated photo printers that only do 6x4 inch prints, but are more portable. Two of the models here have optional batteries, so you can carry them around and print photos on the spot.

Red and yellow and pink...

Like price, the number of inks a printer uses isn't a reliable guide to quality. In general, at least four dye-based photo inks - cyan, magenta, yellow and black - should be used for photo output. Some printers turn out decent photos using just the three colours, combining them to create black, but this composite black can look faded or brownish.

Some photo printers use six or more inks, including shades such as light cyan and light magenta. This enables subtler shading, but not necessarily better quality overall, so you'll have to read our reviews to find out which printers give the best results. We printed a full set of test photos on each of them, allowing us to evaluate general print quality and test specific challenges such as low-contrast images, skin tones and fine detail.

All these printers but one are inkjets, spraying tiny droplets of ink onto the page through scores of nozzles in the print head. The more dots, the more detail can be rendered and the more accurate colours can be, bearing in mind that thousands of dots of a few inks are being combined to produce millions of colours. For photo printing, look for a resolution of at least 1200x1200dpi.

In case you're wondering, that doesn't mean your photos need a resolution of 1200dpi. The norm is 300 pixels per inch. Again, the difference is because of those multiple dots making up each pixel. To work out the effective resolution of an image, divide its width in pixels by the output size in inches. For example, if you have a 2560x1920 photo, and print it 10 inches wide, you'll get 2560 / 10 = 256 pixels per inch. That's a bit less than 300, so quality will be OK but not as crisp as it could be.

Many photo printers can print directly from your digital camera using PictBridge, which lets you plug the camera into the printer, or by removing the camera's memory card and inserting it in a slot in the printer. Make sure your printer supports the same memory card as your camera: for example, Sony's DPP-FP70 doesn't handle the xD format used by many Fujifilm and Olympus cameras. If you intend to print direct from the camera a lot, rather than from your PC, it's worth getting a printer with a decent screen built in to help you choose and edit images.

...and green

Photo printers do tend to have high print costs, both for photos and other documents. We've calculated standard A4 costs for those that can print on normal paper, plus the cost of a single 6x4 inch photo, including both ink and paper. You can find discounts on ink and paper by shopping around, and you may get good results with papers that aren't made by the printer manufacturer. Unofficial inks tend to be more hit-and-miss.

If you plan to keep your prints for posterity, only the manufacturer's own ink and paper will guarantee longevity.