[Emello]

We're looking for a good inkjet for around $200 US, that will do a good job with photos and at least decent with text. The fastest speed is not necessary. Our current camera is 3+ megapixels, canon A75. We're considering the HP 8250, Epson R320. Any other suggestions, or experiences with those printers? Thanks.

[slipe]

Ink costs for text pages are a little pricey with a pure photo printer. The R320 has a black tank the same size as the other colors and the HP 8250 has a slightly larger black tank, which is only 17ml compared to the 43ml black tank on their general purpose printers. The black ink on pure photo printers doesn’t seem to be as strong even with pigmented inks. Text doesn’t seem quite as good as a general purpose printer.

This has some HP reviews: http://breakingnewsblog.com/printer/...otosmart_8250/ It doesn’t look great at anything and ink is pricey. HP in the past had the advantage of not running cleaning cycles with the old cartridges with the print heads in the cartridge. The 8250 has a permanent head and runs regular cleaning cycles. The color tanks are quite small compared to others. 4.5ml is ridiculous IMO. The “large” black tank is only slightly larger than the small color tanks on a Canon.

The R320 seems to be competent at photos and not so great with text. Reviews weren’t great like the R800 and 1800, but it does good photos and seems to have more ink in the color cartridges.

I don’t see any use for the LCD if you are connecting it to a computer. The card readers might be good. I think your A75 is USB1 and you would probably get faster transfer speeds with the USB2 card readers. But I think it is safer to just leave the card in the camera and download directly. Many people disagree with me on that.

If it is to be your only printer you might want to look at some general purpose printers with large black tanks. http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/artic...,122482,00.asp You might want to read Steve’s conclusions on the Canon iP5200. He compares the output to his 8 color photo printer and wonders why you need all of the extra colors when the iP5200 puts out such great photos. I like the two paper trays and duplex printing also. http://www.steves-digicams.com/2005_...on_ip5200.html I’m not too sure what advantage the iP5200 has over the highly rated and cheaper iP4200. They are both 1 picoleter with the same resolution and use the new Canon inks. Neither will print on CDs though.

[Emello]

Thanks, we ended getting a Canon Ip6600D, it has a 6 tank color system. At first use there seems to be a possible problem with the color of some prints. An ocean sunset with only small hints of red came out kinda of red and purple. Our old HP 920C seemed to get the blues of the water better with the same photo, but we'll have to play around with the settings. Any experiences with Canon Chromalife inks? Thanks, again.

[slipe]

I have an iP4000 as a general purpose printer and an older S9000 wide format photo printer. Neither use the new inks.

Steve didn’t have any problems with the ChromaLife inks in his iP5200 test. It doesn’t use photo magenta or photo cyan, but I doubt if that is the problem.

Try printing directly from a program. The free Irfanview does a good job. That will bypass any enhancement the Canon stuff is doing. I notice it can correct for face colors etc, which could affect the output on a sunset if you have any of that enabled.

If you are still using your old HP paper it could be affecting the output.

[Emello]

Hi, we haven't experimented a lot with new printer, but not using the Canon program to print seemed to correct some of the off hued printing of the sunset. Other photos came out fine. Tweaking the colors, reducing red in Photoshop really helped. The quality of the photos is really good, so much better than our previous printer, an general purpose HP920C. Thanks for your advice.

[slipe]

I don’t use Canon Easy-PhotoPrint anymore. Even with all of the enhancements turned off it gives me different output than Photoshop or Irfanview. With my version of PhotoPrint I have to convert to JPG first, and I prefer to print the PSD file.

You might want to try RGB rather than the default sRGB in Photoshop. It gives richer colors without altering them.

You also do better if you calibrate the monitor if you haven’t done that. The utility that comes with Photoshop helps a lot. There are pricey programs that do a better job, but I get by without them.

[I Fix 4 U]

My HP PSC 1510 has good quality/speed/efficiency. It also has a nice scanner/copier built in if you want a "printer scanner copier"
Didn't cost much, $100+$30 for USB cable.

[bkpeck]

I use a Epson C62!! It makes beautiful pictures. It is important with any printer to choose the corect settings and experiment with different types of paper. I get wonderful pictures with Epson Primium Glossy. But I do use cheap ink from abcink.com