In the Driver's Seat
The printer driver has all the features one would want in a low-cost photo printer. The main window offers a Basic and Advanced format. In Basic (which should be enough for most family photos) you get five quality options, including Draft, Text, Text & Image, Photo, and Best Photo. It also offers the usual choices of page number and paper type, print preview, orientation (portrait or landscape), and the current ink levels. You can also print out borderless photos, if you wish. If you're into tweaking your colors, the Advanced mode lets you play with brightness, saturation, contrast, and individual color intensity.The two other driver tabs include Page Layout, which lets you rotate, reduce, or enlarge your document, add a watermark, or do double-sided printing (which, in this case, means the driver prints out the first sides of your sheets, and then instructs you to replace them for printing o the second side.)
Finally, the Maintenance tab offers a variety of applets to keep the printer working well, including nozzle check, head clearing, and print head alignment.
Consumables
As of this writing, Staples charges $24.99 for a black ink cartridge, and $12.99 each for a color cartridge. While it didn't seem as if the color ink was being used up at too fast a rate, the black ink cartridge that the printer shipped with was down to half after three photos and about 45 pages of text.Conclusion
This is obviously not a printer for serious photographers, those who want to be able to print directly from their cameras and/or memory cards, or those who want a printer for business use. For that, a higher-priced printer with six or eight ink cartridges and more features would be appropriate.However, there is a place for low-cost photo printers in the pantheon of today's consumer printers. For example, if you want to get a printer for a youngster or adolescent that will be simple to install and use, will offer good-quality images, and won't set you back too much if it gets broken, this is a good idea. It could also work quite well for households that can't budget too much for a photo printer, but want to produce nice prints to pass around at family gatherings.
Facts
Price: $79.99Max. Print Speed: 22ppm black, 12ppm color
Resolution: 5760 x 1440 dpi (optimized)
Max. Input: 120 Sheets plain paper/20 sheets photo
Max. Printable Area: 8.5 x 44 inches
Port: USB 2.0, parallel
OS: Windows 98 and later; Mac OS X 10.2 and later
Dimensions: 18.1 x 17.2 x 12.2 inches
Weight: 10.1 lbs.
