Some Advice About Inkjet Printers, Part 3

I have doled out a lot of verbal advice over the past few years related to inkjet printers: which ones to buy, when to replace the cartridges, when to replace the printer you've got, and so on.

This is Part 3 of a three-part series of Tech Tips focusing on inkjet printers. If you missed Parts 1 and 2, click here to read from the beginning.


7. When buying an inkjet printer, consider a model that loads paper from the top.

Inkjet printers, like all other types of printers, load paper in different ways. The two predominant ways are from the top, like a typewriter, and from the bottom, like a photocopier. Although bottom-loading printers may be more aesthetically-pleasing, since the paper tray is underneath the printer and out-of-sight, the top-loading style has better long-term reliability.

Top-loading printers work with the force of gravity to pull the paper into the machine. Bottom-loading printers, on the other hand, have to pull sheets of paper against the force of gravity. The pulling is done by a series of rubber rollers. These rollers harden and lose their ability to grip the page over time, and they are usually first to fail on bottom-loading inkjet printers.

While rollers like these are a cost-effective and somewhat routine fix for laser printers, they are neither cost-effective nor routine for inkjet printers. If your bottom-loading inkjet printer begins to have trouble loading paper, its days are probably numbered. By comparison, a top-loading inkjet printer tends to see longer roller life, and even when the rollers wear out, gravity can help them along. You can often coax life out of a top-loading printer with failing rollers simply by "retrying" print jobs until the paper finally feeds, thanks to gravity. Bottom-loading printers do not have the same benefit.

8. When printing photos, brand of paper really does matter!

I mentioned earlier in this 3-part series that you do have a choice of brand when it comes to ink. However, if you plan to print high-quality photos (glossy or matte), you may be better off shelling out the money on the printer-brand ink and paper.

Yes, that's right: the brand of paper actually matters. I can't tell you what the physical differences are between brands of paper. I can't elaborate on the physics or chemistry of Epson ink and Canon paper. But I will offer a brief, marginally-thrilling true story as a word of caution.

Until not long ago, I owned a Canon inkjet printer capable of photo printing. In the early years, I always used Canon ink and Canon paper and found the photo results to be consistently impressive. While the colors on the photo that came out of the printer weren't exactly the same as those on the photo you saw on the screen, they were fairly close. Given that my monitor was never calibrated professionally, what you saw on the screen wasn't necessarily any less accurate than what you got on the page.

After a couple of years using the Canon and loving the photo output, I found a good deal on some generic photo paper at a computer show and brought some home. Guess what the results with the new paper were? Awful. The ink actually failed to sink into the page completely, instead pooling on top of the paper in big droplets. Unacceptable quality. I assumed that what I had was bargain-basement paper, and I got what I paid for.

Then about a year later, I picked up some Staples brand and some Kodak brand inkjet photo paper. Cue the printing problems a second time. Photos that looked great on the screen were coming out completely wrong on the page. Horribly wrong: green skin tones, oversaturation, overly-dark and under-contrasted colors. Even the Kodak paper yielded poor results no matter what printer settings I used. Painstakingly trying every photo paper setting and color processing setting in the Canon printer settings, nothing would work. I probably wasted an entire package of expensive photo paper and tens of dollars worth of ink trying to figure out what the problem was.

I thought for sure my printer was slowly dying, yet when I later when I tried again using Canon paper, the photos came out clear and accurate. It was then that I realized that I needed to purchase paper made by the same company that made my printer. I'm not sure if the poor results are the natural result when you disturb the delicate, engineered chemical balance between Canon ink and Canon paper, or simply another deliberate boardroom-hatched plot by Canon to force you to buy their expendables. Either way, if photos are what you're trying to make, you'll probably want to just shell out the extra bucks and save yourself a few headaches.

9. The best way to avoid all these inkjet headaches? Buy a laser printer. Seriously.

After reading three weeks of pure vitriol from me on the topic of inkjet printers, it should be no surprise to you that my final piece of advice to you is simple: avoid purchasing an inkjet printer if you can.

In the '80s and early '90s, those of us who had home computers used dot-matrix printers -- those noisy, slow printers that boasted lame features like "Near Letter Quality". They were the inexpensive home alternative to the expensive laser printers that were blossoming in the workplace. Late in the decade, inkjet printers took the baton from dot-matrix printers, offering silent operation, superior resolution, and even the ability to print photo-like images. At the time, inkjet printers were a boon for all of us, as laser printers were still prohibitively expensive for most home use.

In recent years, however, laser printers have come down so far in price that they now must be considered by any home user. The local big box store carries black-and-white laser printers for as little as $80, and color laser printers now can be found for as little as $250.

Think that a laser printer for your home PC is overkill? Think again:

• Laser printers are far more durable than inkjet printers. In my workplace, I can count several HP LaserJet 4 laser printers still in use today. These printers were manufactured circa 1994.....fourteen years ago.
• Laser toner cartridges cost more than inkjet ink cartridges, but they last many times longer. So much longer, in fact, that it is actually much cheaper, page for page, to print on a laser printer than on an inkjet printer. Need an example? We had an Epson Action Laser printer in our family that was purchased circa 1993. When I threw it away about 18 months ago, it was still working -- and more importantly, it was still on its original toner cartridge, more than a dozen years later! That one toner cartridge lasted so long that it long outlived its production run at Epson.
• Ask yourself if you really need color at home. If you don't do photo printing, you probably don't need it, and can find a B&W laser printer for about what you'd pay for an inkjet printer.
• Don't forget that laser printers reign supreme at printing text. Inkjet text printing has come a long way over the years, but laser text printing still looks as good as a page out of a textbook. Line drawings, sheet music, logos, and other vector-based artwork also look superior when printed out on a laser printer.

When my Canon inkjet printer finally died, I decided I'd had it with inkjet printers and made the leap to a color laser printer. After months of comparison shopping, I settled on the Brother HL-4070CDW. I couldn't be happier with it. Not only does it print the usual laser-sharp text and graphics, plus very good photos, but it is "fully-duplexed", allowing it to print on both sides of the page automatically. (A good idea for those of us trying to save a few trees...and a few dollars while we're at it.) The printer has a built-in network interface like most laser printers, but what really sets this one apart is that it also has a built-in wireless network interface. Now, I can locate this printer anywhere in my home that I want, and any computer in the house can print to it wirelessly. That's nice if you have a good-sized house and want to locate the printer in a central location like the kitchen, but your wireless router is upstairs in the home office.

In conclusion, while we all thought that computers would someday lead us to a paperless society, the proliferation of inkjet printers has only proven the opposite to be true. We like to make hard copies of what we see on the screen, and we like to make lots of them. But we don't often think about how much each page of printing costs us. So it's very important to take the time to buy the right printer for your PC.

Just remember this:

• Cost of gasoline.......................$3 per gallon
• Cost of Starbucks coffee........$32 per gallon
• Cost of inkjet printer ink.......upwards of $8000 per gallon