Colour newspapers are proof that the price of print technology is falling. And now there's a range of affordable colour printers for the Mac. Jim Chandler puts five to the test.
All new Macs are colour machines, so doesn't it make sense to have a colour printer too? After all, what's the point of putting together all those wonderful pictures in Photoshop or KidPix if they just look like rather nasty newspaper clippings when they're printed?
We decided to test a handful of popular non-PostScript colour printers, ranging in price from about £270 to about £1,000. They use a variety of technologies - inkjet, thermal wax transfer and dye sublimation, and they show great differences in quality. Interestingly, it's not always the case that the cheapest is the worst. But as with almost anything, you'll have to pay top-end prices for top-end quality.
The tests threw up some interesting points. First, colour printers are no good if you're in a hurry. All the printers we tested took between five and 20 minutes to print a colour page, although most trundled through black-only pages at quite respectable speeds. The number of inks used was an issue too. In theory, almost any colour can be produced by mixing three 'process colours' - cyan (a pale blue), magenta (a pinkish purple) and yellow. Mixing all of them together in equal quantities should give shades of grey, and eventually, black. In practice, however, it just doesn't work: the inks are never quite pure shades of the process colours, and mixing them tends to result in a kind of muddy brownish-green. This is why professional colour printing uses a fourth colour - black - instead of relying on a mix of the others.
This principle holds true for computer printers too. All the test machines use cyan, magenta and yellow. Some have a black cartridge or ribbon in addition. If you intend to print much black text, or many pages mixing text and graphics, it's important to know how that black is going to be formed. Sepia-style blacks are not always attractive...
We ran the same tests on all the printers: we used a couple of scanned images that contained subtle colours like flesh tones; some pages with blocks of colour, in the style of presen
