Top 10 Photo Printers | PC World Picks
PC World has named their Top 10 Inkjet Printers. New models from Canon and HP capture the two Best Buys this month, and the Canon also zooms to the head of the class.
They are:
- Canon Pixma iP4200
- HP Deskjet 450wbt
- HP Deskjet 5740
- HP Deskjet 5440
- Canon Pixma iP90
- HP Deskjet 5940
- HP DeskJet 6840
- HP Business Inkjet 1200d
- Canon Pixma IP1600
- Epson Stylus C88
Two new inkjets earn Best Buys this month: the $130 Canon Pixma iP4200 and the $80 HP Deskjet 5440. The Pixma iP4200 is fast, prints high-quality photos, and comes with an automatic duplexer for making double-sided prints. The Deskjet 5440 prints banners up to 24 inches long and produces high-quality prints of text, line art, and color graphics. And like the Pixma iP4200, the Deskjet 5440 offers a PictBridge port for printing directly from a compatible digital camera. The Deskjet 5440 printed a glossy photo in 44 seconds–faster than any other model we tested–though the prints looked slightly grainy.
Two other new models that we tested didn’t fare as well. The $50 Canon Pixma iP1600, the least-expensive model to make the chart this month, printed text almost as quickly as the pricier iP4200, but its letters exhibited rougher edges and the colors in its photos looked slightly faded. Similarly, the new $80 Epson Stylus C88 printed rough-looking text. The C88 is the only model here that can print banners up to 44 inches long; on plain paper, however, its color graphics lacked some of the fine details that many other models reproduced, and line art printed with unsightly banding.
The new, $100 HP Deskjet 5940 printed line art with obvious banding, and its glossy photos suffered from the same flaw. The unit’s color graphics, on the other hand, showed sharp details and accurate colors.
