Print your photos in picture-perfect quality

There’s no way you can talk about printers without mentioning digital photography. While printers stemmed from a time when there was no real concept of digital cameras, they’ve responded to the challenges that we’ve set them.

And they’ve responded well – the quality of your average printer is good at the least, while some printers are capable of producing photos that are indistinguishable from those processed in a lab.

So what makes a printer these days is what you’re going to use it for. Do you need to be able to plug memory cards straight into your printer? How about a scanner and fax? Do you want to be able to print in mono? To help make your mind up, here's some reasonable printers at less than £100.

The portable photo lab - Epson PM240 (£100)

Miniaturisation has given the world some funky things and this compact, yet incredibly powerful, printer is definitely one of the best ways to prove that bigger isn’t necessarily better. There are more compact photo printers around and you could argue that there are more stylish models, too, but there’s something deeply charming about this little Epson.

The images this printer produced were sharp, bright and full of detail – in fact, they look every bit as good as anything you’d usually get from a professional service.

It’s worth mentioning a rather obvious negative with this printer, though: it’s too small for big prints. Being limited to 10 x 15cm (4 x 6in) prints is fine nearly all of the time, but when you take something you’d want to hang on your wall you’re going to need a bigger printer.

This is a truly standalone printer, though, with plenty of control over your images thanks to the LCD display. It’s incredibly versatile as far as accepting photos goes, too. Drop the flap on the front of the unit and you’ll find two ports awaiting the usual swathe of memory cards. Peer round the rear of the machine and you’ll discover a pair of USB ports – one for connecting the printer to your PC and the other for attaching your USB keys and external hard drives.

The latter option means you don’t need to have the printer in the same room as your PC, or even in the house – a battery option is also available if you need to take it on the road with you, making this a good choice for people who want instant prints when they’re out and about.

The multifunctional assistant - Canon MP510

Digital photography is all very clever and impressive, but if you’ve got a lot of old photographs hanging around, it can be tricky integrating them into your digitally orientated way of working. This is where a multifunction device slides into view, giving you the chance to convert everything you’ve ever snapped, on any camera, into a digital photo library.

Canon cunningly manages to push this integration one step further. Slide a memory card into the MP510 and elect to print a contact sheet. Tick the images you want to print out, load up your paper of choice and then scan in the filled-in contact sheet and the printer takes care of the rest, only producing the images you want. This is a really nice way of handling lots of photos, though it is environmentally questionable.

We found setting up the unit overly fiddly, despite the fact that it only has three coloured inks and an oversized black. A caddy is needed to hold the inks in place, although, bizarrely, this isn’t removable; instead, everything is inserted under the hood, which is pretty cramped – in normal lighting it can be hard to see what’s going on.

This is a noisy beast while it’s in operation – even when you select quiet mode it clunks and clanks its way through the whole printing process. This, coupled with an interface that errs on the side of frustration, makes the MP510 an option that only the patient should tackle. Those buyers who do take the plunge, however, will be rewarded with fantastic prints.

The budget office companion - Lexmark X5470

Before we say anything about this printer, it’s worth clarifying something about the price – look around and you can pick this up for as little as £45. There’s no guarantee you’ll be able to find it for that, but then you may be able to find it even cheaper with a little digging. Either way, this is a budget option with surprising capabilities way beyond what you’d normally consider the remit of the small office printer.

If you’re looking for a printer that’s just as happy printing out your boring black-and-white documents as it is producing colour photographs, then there’s a lot to offer here. In testing we witnessed the printer churn out text documents at a rate of roughly 10 per minute, which isn’t at all bad for the low price. Laser printers have the edge here, but you’ll need to print out a lot to justify the expense of going down that route.

The quality of colour prints isn’t quite in the same league as some of those produced by other printers we’ve looked at here, with photos lacking sharp detail and vivid colours. This is a multifunction device, though, so if you’re primarily looking for a way of scanning your photos, it’s to be commended – it’s speedy and the quality is excellent.

The package also includes OCR software, which works really well, and a fax, making it all the more impressive for the money.

However, corners have had to be cut in order to keep the price down, and an obvious thing to get the chop here is the colour LCD screen. This makes printing straight from memory cards a hit and miss affair – or at least it does if you’re trying to use this as a standalone device. Hook it up to your PC and things are much more straightforward, enabling you to see more clearly what’s going on, although you can’t really get away from the relatively lowquality prints, and that could be the clincher for photographers.

The uncompromising photo printer- HP Photosmart D7160

While other manufacturers look at bolting scanners, fax machines or other doodads on to their printers, HP has concentrated on what people are most likely to do with a photo printer – print photos. In order to produce pictures in the best way possible, the manufacturer has elected to go down the six-ink route. This is a boon on two levels: the quality of the fi nal print is higher with a six-ink process, and it also makes replacing inks more economical.

As there’s little in the way of bells and whistles here, the Photosmart can only really be judged on its ability to produce decent prints and, luckily for HP, the results are generally very impressive. Colour rendering and saturation are good, and there’s lots of detail, too, although this was only after changing the quality to the highest settings – the default option produced somewhat grainy images, although the print speed is breathtaking for an inkjet.

There is a slight clanking to the paper feed, but the machine is much quieter than the Canon when it’s actually printing. The LCD screen makes using the system as a standalone device easy; indeed, it’s second only to Epson’s PM240 in the ease of use stakes (with the added advantage that comes with being able to print on paper up to A4 – decent sized contact sheets, so you can see your thumbnails more clearly).

We did find that Epson’s machine produced slightly brighter prints, but this could be down to the paper quality rather than anything else. The prints did seem a little tacky, although enough care and attention should mean that this isn’t a real problem – take care of the quality prints as they come out of this printer, and they’ll be fine.

Our only real criticism of the D7160 is that the screen is a little small, but that’s not enough to put us off.