The ‘All-in-One' cartridge technology also enables users to lower their ongoing running costs. With this technology the Intermediate Transfer Unit, Photosensitive Drum, and Waste Toner Container are combined in one unit, resulting in fewer consumables to stock, low maintenance and reduced running costs.

The LBP-3100 also features High Speed USB 2.0 connectivity for fast data transfer and to ensure quick printing and energy reduction, the Laser Shot LBP-3100 has adopted Canon's On-Demand Fixing System for low power consumption and quick start-up.

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There’s a lot of talk about ink cartridges these days - the cost, disposal, recycling. What many people are overlooking is the opportunity to conserve. HP hasn’t overlooked this notion and has come out with the new Photosmart D5463 Printer which can help save ink.

The Photosmart D5463 Printer is an everyday printer for the home that provides lab quality photos and pristine laser-quality documents. The HP website points all the fact that the printer has all kinds of nifty features, including a “3.8 cm colour display, memory card slots, HP Smart Web Printing, and an auto-engaging photo tray, making printing photos and photo projects effortless. The HP Photosmart D5463 Printer also prints photos and text directly on CDs and DVDs.”

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Laser printers are one of the heavyweights of the office. Every time there is a fault, a sweaty, groaning engineer needs to be called in. Once they have a home, they just don’t want to be moved anywhere. Ricoh is tackling such clichés head on. With their Aficio SP 3300D, they have managed to create a laser printer which measures 36 x 37 x 21cm and weighs less than 9kg. Although that doesn’t quite make it small enough to use with the laptop, it is light enough to be moved without having to call in reinforcements.

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Printer manufacturer Brother has launched a new leasing programme in an attempt to increase margins for its resellers and help them extend relationships with their clients.

The Print Smart programme allows businesses to lease their printers in an all-inclusive package through Brother’s affiliated resellers.

“For users, it is about hassle-free printing. For resellers, the objective is client ownership,” said Phil Jones, Brother’s sales and marketing director. “We want to take the complications out of both of their lives.”

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Samsung Electronics Canada, a leader in IT technology innovation, is demonstrating its intention to be a leader in the printer category by introducing two of the fastest A4 digital multi-function printers (MFP) in the world. The MultiXpress C8380ND and the MultiXpress 6555N provide enterprising businesses - large and small - colour printing, copying, scanning and faxing capabilities in a compact and streamlined package.

"With today's announcement, Samsung is expanding our printer family in order to aggressively grow our marketshare by providing Canadian businesses with a broad portfolio of high quality, reliable and cost effective products," says Ron Hulse, Vice President, Sales and Marketing, IT Division, Samsung Electronics Canada.

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Dell's V305w prints, scans, and copies, and it does it all without wires. That's right, it's a Wi-Fi-enabled all-in-one. And it's on sale for a measly 60 bucks, shipping included! (Make sure to choose "3-5 Day Delivery" when you get to the checkout.)

This is a brand new model from Dell; it launched just a week ago, so it's surprising to see such a steep discount already (it normally sells for $129).

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There's quite a trend among printer makers to produce bigger, heavier-weight inkjets to challenge the dominance of laser printers in offices. First HP and now Epson with its B-500DN, have produced machines claimed to be as cheap to run and nearly as fast as equivalent lasers, but with the bonus of better colour quality and lower energy use.

To be kind to the B-500DN, you would say that it had unconventional styling. To be accurate, you would say it was a monolithic printer with a big square bulge. That bulge holds the four ink cartridges and, given their size, it's hard to see where else in the printer's case they could go.

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If you don't need color, monochrome lasers are still the workhorse printer of choice for an office. The lack of color, however, rules them out for dedicated or near-dedicated photo printing or for home use, which also assumes the ability to print photos.

There are no monochrome lasers small enough to serve as mobile printers, but some are smaller than many inkjets, making them potentially good choices for a personal printer. As with color lasers, there are other technologies, notably LED printers, that are similar enough so all the comments here about monochrome lasers apply to those printers as well. (There are no monochrome solid-ink printers.)

It's easy to find a single function mono laser that's small enough to fit on your desk without dominating your desktop. It's a little harder, but still possible, to find an all-in-one (AIO) that's small enough to fit comfortably on a desk too. Prices start at well below $200 for a single-function printer, and a little less than $250 for an AIO.

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Make your own Tattoos using your inkjet or laser printer.

Have you always fancied having a tattoo but didn’t want to have to go through the pain of having one done. Now you can have as many painless tattoos as you like by just using your inkjet or laser printer. Print off any designs on to the special tattoo paper including photos or even your own drawings and transfer them to any body part in minutes. The tattoo paper is so easy to use and tattoos can easily last for up to a week before they wash off. You can mix and match designs and even have a different tattoo every week of the year!

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The most popular printers tend to be all-singing, all-dancing ‘multifunction’ devices with a built-in scanner and copier, and some even have wireless networking and other fancy features.

However, Lexmark has gone right back to basics with the Z2320, it being a good low-cost printer that will appeal to home users on a tight budget.

The Z2320 is a conventional inkjet printer but it costs just £40 and provides good quality for both black and white and colour printing.

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Buying replacement ink from a third-party vendor can save you big bucks. But will you pay with lousy-looking prints that fade in no time?

Razor-blade makers sell consumers the shaver at low prices and then make a killing selling replacement blades. Printer manufacturers do the same thing -- selling their printers on the cheap and then making bank on expensive consumables like ink. It's a time-tested practice that's inspired a lively aftermarket of cheap ink from third-party suppliers.

The printer makers -- the original equipment manufacturers, or OEMs -- claim that their ink is worth the premium prices they charge for it. OEM ink, they say, creates images that are more accurate and color-rich and longer-lived. Third-party suppliers, on the other hand, say that their inks are just as good but cost a lot less. For example, HP charges $18 for a black ink cartridge for its Photosmart C5180 printer, but the same cartridge remanufactured by Cartridge World costs only $8.75.

Who's telling the truth? To find out, PC World teamed up with the Rochester Institute of Technology, a respected research university known for its top-notch laboratory for testing imaging products. Using popular ink jet printers from Canon, Epson, Hewlett-Packard, Kodak and Lexmark, we ran side-by-side tests of brand-name and third-party inks to compare image quality and fade resistance. We also tracked how many pages each cartridge churned out before running dry.

Our tests show that all of the third-party inks in our test group yielded more prints per cartridge -- on top of costing less -- but that, with some notable exceptions, the printer manufacturers' ink we evaluated usually produced better-quality prints and proved more resistant to fading. Of course, our conclusions apply only to the printers we tested. We couldn't test all of the printers that are available (partly because you can't get third-party ink for all of them), so we picked a set of mainstream ink-jet printers from recognized brands as a way of taking a snapshot view of the ink market.

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Does anyone still fax anything? If the proliferation of e-mail, PDFs and online document-sharing hasn't already persuaded many people to stop sending paperwork by fax, maybe this will: Federal officials announced Friday that Hewlett-Packard is voluntarily recalling 451,000 fax machines because of concerns they might catch fire.

"An internal electrical component failure can cause overheating of the product, posing a risk of burn or fire," said the Consumer Product Safety Commission's press release.

HP blamed a problem in the power cord and related components, which under certain circumstances "may result in an overheating event."

The recall involves machines sold under two model names, the HP Fax 1010 and 1010xi, that were manufactured in China and sold from November 2002 to December 2004, at a price of $130 to $150.

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Brother unveiled the first product in its new Professional series of color inkjet all-in-one printers. The MFC-6490CW is targeted at small-business and home-office customers who require the ability to print, copy, scan and fax on paper measuring up to 11 inches by 17 inches.

The device features built-in wired Ethernet or wireless 802.11b/g network interfaces. It has dual paper trays to accommodate both standard 8-inch by 11-inch paper, and 11-inch by 17-inch paper; it can accommodate up to 400 sheets and features an automatic document feeder that can accommodate up to 50 sheets at once. Print speeds register at 35 ppm in black and 28ppm in color.

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Most of the multifunction machines we review come from manufacturers who specialise in printers. Some even buy in the scanner component to make their devices. Sharp, however, comes primarily from the photocopier market and the AR-M201 is an office photocopier which can also print. Printing isn't an afterthought, though, as the machine can print in full duplex, handling both sides of each page in a single job.


The AR-M201 looks rather different from multifunction printers you may be used to. It's quite a bit bigger than most and designed much more like a photocopier than a printer. Paper is loaded sideways in the single 250-sheet tray (a second 250-sheet tray is available as an option). It feeds through the machine from right to left and ends up on an output tray with a large aperture on the left-hand side, so you can remove the finished pages. A50-sheet special-media tray folds down from the right-hand side, giving a total, unexpanded capacity of 300 sheets.

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It's disturbing to see trees being felled to make paper, worse when most of us just print on one side of the sheet. Although duplex printing function is slowly being introduced into more inkboxes, we still have to buy more paper when the tray is empty.

This shouldn't pose a problem for Toshiba which has developed the B-SX8R. This printer can erase the contents on the paper, ready to be printed on again. The revolutionary idea works on the basis that certain mixtures of pigments change color when heated to a particular temperature. This is different from the technology Xerox employed by using ink that fades after a period of time.

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Dell launched three all-in-ones (AIOs) on Tuesday, the V105, V305, and the V305w, the V305's wireless counterpart. Each AIO provides printing, scanning, and copying for consumers and small businesses.

Dell's V105 is a compact and easy-to-use AIO that has document and photo-printing, copy, and scan functionalities. It features a 7-segment LED display, with two illuminated ink low/out indications on the Op panel, and menu screens that Dell says are easy to navigate. It offers borderless photo printing up to 5 by 7 inches, and has a one-touch 4-by-6 photo copy feature. Direct copy allows copying in mono or color. According to Dell, the V105 has a print speed of up 22 pages per minute (ppm) in mono and 17 ppm in color on letter-size paper. Its print resolution is up to 4,800-by-1,200 dots per inch (dpi) and scan resolution is up to 600-by-1,200 dpi.

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Inkjet printing is the only technology that cuts across all the usage categories we look at in this story. Some models are meant for home use, some are aimed at offices, some are meant to print nothing but photos, and some are designed for mobile printing, complete with batteries. Most inkjets are meant as personal printers or, at most, shared printers for printing a few pages per day. The vast majority are small enough to share a desk with the rest of your home or home-office set up.

That said, the technology is showing up in more and more printers meant for heavier-duty printing, including, at the extreme, HP's floor-standing Edgeline models with five-figure price tags. These are very much the exception, however. Many, if not most, inkjets don't even have a published duty cycle, and for those that do, the ratings are laughably low compared with lasers, often measured in a few thousand pages over the lifetime of the printer. The maximum paper capacity in inkjets is often as low as 100 sheets, and rarely more than 300 sheets.

Almost any current inkjet can print photos that at least match the quality you'd expect from your local drugstore. The few exceptions are primarily among printers aimed at offices, but even most office inkjets do a decent job with photos. If you pick carefully, you can find all-purpose inkjets whose output rivals photo printers meant for professional photographers.

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Most printers, including most so-called photo inkjet printers, have one thing in common: They're meant for all-purpose printing—text, graphics, and photos. Some do a better job with some kinds of output than with others, but they aren't designed for one specific kind of output. Dedicated and near-dedicated photo printers are different. They're designed with one goal in mind: printing high-quality photos on photo paper.

In theory, these photo printers can use any technology. In practice, the only two technologies (so far) that offer true photo quality are inkjet and thermal dye (also known by the misnomer "dye sublimation"). Thermal-dye printers use heat to transfer dye from plastic rolls to paper with a plastic coating.

Dedicated photo printers—aimed primarily at home users who want to print their photos with as little work as possible—are easy to spot: You can't use them for anything but photos—practically if not literally. Thermal-dye paper looks and feels like photo paper, so it's useless for standard printing. Also, most dedicated photo printers are limited to small formats, with a maximum paper size of 4 by 6 inches, although some can print 4-by-12-inch panoramas as well. For those who want to print larger photos, a few small-format printers can print at up to 5 by 7 inches.

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You can have the best digital camera on the block, but that won't matter if your prints are no good. The fact is that to get the most out of digital photography, you need to devote as much time to learning about photo printers as you do about digital cameras.

Part of the challenge lies in knowing which photo printer will best suit your needs. Another part is understanding which features that are commonly touted by printer manufacturers really matter.

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Lexmark has a large range of inkjet printers and a larger range of all-in-ones, but the printers often seem to be the same mechanisms dressed up in different cases. The Z2320 is an entry-level device, based on twin, integrated print head and ink cartridges.


Coloured in white and light grey and with a smartly embossed silver Lexmark logo on its top surface, this printer has just one control, a power button. The paper feed tray at the back folds down over the printer's top cover and the output tray slides in underneath the machine, so it can have a very small footprint when it's not actually printing.


At the back are a single USB 2 socket and the plug-in power supply. This is a clever innovation on Lexmark's part, though it has been around a few years, as it enables different power packs to be slotted in for different regional voltage supplies, giving the manufacturer an easy way to change between PSUs. It also saves on lumbering the customer with a cumbersome, cabled power block knocking around on the desk.

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A lot has been written about printers, most of it extremely boring; I plan to carry on that tradition.


Until home printers came along, we relied on professional printing outfits to produce our work.

While the results were excellent, it was inconvenient.

The first printers available to the home user were so-called impact printers.

These beasts worked like a typewriter, in that a print head, made up of a matrix of pins, moved back and forth along a shaft while paper scrolled beneath it.

The pins hammered the paper through an ink ribbon, leaving characters imprinted on the paper.

These printers are characterised by their tractor-feed paper (remember computer paper, with the holes down each side?) and their extremely loud screeching while printing.

Many a secretary was deafened after years of sitting next to one of these puppies.

The printers worked well and many are still in use.

Indeed they are still available, though they are relatively expensive.

Then ink-jet technology came along and changed home printing for ever. Now everyone can print professional-looking, high-quality documents, even photographs. Ink-jets work by blowing ink onto the paper.

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In our tests, prints made with manufacturers' ink looked better and lasted longer than those made with third-party replacement inks. Want to see for yourself? Here are some examples.

The print on the left, made using Lexmark's own ink in a Lexmark X3470 inkjet printer, looks slightly washed-out and evidences some slight horizontal banding (abrupt changes in color tone that are too subtle to see in this JPEG image). Nevertheless, this print wis distinctly superior to the a print of the same image produced with Walgreens Lexmark-compatible ink (right), which looks grainier and more washed-out, and shows far more pronounced horizontal banding.

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TROY Group, Inc., a Worldwide leader in Secure On-Demand Printing Solutions, announces our new line of MICR Printers based on the HP LaserJet P4014n, P4015n, and P4515n series printers. TROY's full-line of MICR Printers provides built-in features which help secure your on-demand document printing process.

The TROY MICR 4014, 4015 and 4515 Printers are available in three security configurations, giving customers a range of fraud deterrent and operational security options. The TROY MICR 4014, a base level MICR printer, provides all the TROY recommended options necessary for reliable check printing. The TROY MICR 4015 and 4515, a MICR Secure model, include additional features providing a higher level of security for use in higher risk printing environments. TROY's fully featured MICR Secure Ex printer, available as a TROY MICR 4015 and 4515, offers the highest level of security available to financial professionals. The TROY Secure Ex product line offers 3-position key lock control, paper tray locks and enhanced printer firmware security to discourage casual and professional fraud. All three models ship with TROY's unique ExPT(TM), Exact Positioning Technology that insures precise placement of the MICR line for reliable check processing.

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This portable photo printer looks like a Sanrio lunch bucket for kids, which is perfect actually, as it gives off the impression of something light and easy to carry (which it is). The compact Canon SELPHY CP770 photo printer is one of the newer additions to Canon's SELPHY line of compact photo printers, and seems made for that person who is just so impatient to print photos that he/she must print while the party is still going on.

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Washington - You can have the best digital camera on the block, but that won't matter if your prints are no good.

The fact is, that to get the most out of digital photography, you need to devote as much time to learning about photo printers as you do about digital cameras.

Part of the challenge lies in knowing which photo printer will best suit your needs. Another part is understanding which features that are commonly touted by printer manufacturers really matter.

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