The Inkjet Set - inkjet printers - Buyers Guide

Laser printer prices got you down? Ink your next printer deal.

When it comes to versatility in a printer, inkjets are able and affordable. Anything from brochures to photos to memos is in reach. There is a bewildering variety of inkjets: thermal inkjets, piezoelectric inkjets, networkable inkjets and more. Your needs will dictate which kind of printer you should get.

Although personal monochrome laser printers have dropped in price, it hasn't been enough to overpower the allure of even cheaper color inkjets. Not just for home use anymore, inkjets are proliferating as convenient personal printers in offices everywhere. If you can tame the materials costs, inkjets can be a wise purchase.

Before you buy, look at print samples from your prospective printer. Local stores are a good place to try this. Look at both text and graphics performance. Printers that put out wonderful graphics may not be so sharp on text and vice versa. If you don't have access to a store that sells the printer you want, contact the manufacturer for print samples and seek out impartial reviews online. Deja.com is a good starting point for practical reviews and helpful user opinions.

If you travel, whether on extended business trips or short visits to clients, note that both Brother and Canon make portable inkjet printers. These tiny printers accommodate letter- and legal-sized paper and fit in laptop cases. The BJC-85 is Canon's latest mobile offering. It weighs in at 3.1 pounds and offers wireless infrared printing, a feature most laptops have built-in. A battery pack is optional, but it's a necessity for true "anywhere" printing.

The Brother MP-2lCdx weighs only 2.2 pounds and is built specifically for use with notebook computers. Connections are made directly through laptops' PCMCIA ports. That's convenient if weight is your concern or if your laptop isn't infrared equipped. If your PCMCIA slots are full, you'll have to either hook up to a built-in parallel connection or pull a card to use this printer.

One area where inkjets excel is in digital photography. Hewlett-Packard and Epson are leaders in this area, offering printers designed to turn out high-quality digital photos. The Epson Stylus Photo 1270 sports extremely fine ink-droplet sizes and six-color technology to achieve photo output. Remember, however, that photo printers tend to work best with their prescribed photo papers. Be sure to figure the extra cost of premium paper into the equation.

For text-heavy usage, inkjets make good individual-workstation printers. They are generally slower than their laser counterparts, but they are more affordable. Most will handle envelopes and odd-sized paper easily. Check a printer's paper-handling capability if you have specific needs.

Making sense of printers' spec sheets should help guide your purchase in the right direction. Do you need thermal or piezoelectric? Does it matter? Thermal involves heating the ink and piezoelectric involves crystals. Neither method is unequivocally superior. As with any hardware, performance and quality can vary greatly within any given product line.

One basic consideration is the connection type. All the printers in our chart have at least a parallel port for connecting to PCs. If you have a Mac, a USB printer, like the Hewlett-Packard HP DeskJet 970Cxi, is your best bet. The Xerox DocuPrint C20 has an optional serial-port adaptor available for older Mac systems. For newer PCs equipped with USB ports, a USB connection is often preferable to parallel for ease of use and faster speeds.

A wide-format printer, such as the Epson Stylus Photo 1270, can accommodate prints of up to 13 by 19 inches as well as banners on special banner paper. This is handy for making large brochures, 11-by-14-inch prints and small posters. If you don't think you'll need that much space, you can save by. buying a letter- and legal-sized printer like the Epson Stylus Photo 870.