Consumer-level photo printers must be one of the few pieces of technology that the internet is completely, utterly useless for researching. The main reason I don’t own an inkjer is that I’ve never been able to figure out which one is the one to buy, and in the last ten years it hasn’t gotten any better. Printer reviews seem to fall into several categories, in increasing levels of usefulness to me:
- CNET-type “reviews”, which aren’t more than a couple of pages and are geared towards grandma or a corporate buyer. They spend most of their time on ease of use, and if they mention quality it’s “text quality was good, and photos looked like lab prints”. They don’t give any indication as to whether they’re qualified to evaluate the photo quality or not. I’m guessing not.
- “Comprehensive” reviews where they spend 10-20 pages with picture after picture of the printer and every single tab of the driver software, and reduce quality evaluations to a couple of paragraphs on the last page or so. Thanks, but I don’t need a recap of the manual. (this type of review is also very common for digital cameras)
- Reviews where they actually make an attempt to evaluate quality with a color-calibrated system and seem to have some clue what prints are supposed to look like. I found this site which seems to fall into this category and is going in my bookmarks. Their reviews are still pretty long and have too many “unpacking the printer” and “here’s what the drivers look like” shots, though.
- The best reviews are ones by pro photographers who wrap the whole thing up in a couple pages, hitting the high points and the low points of setup and usage, and giving a good qualitative evaluation of the print quality. My needs are nowhere near what these guys need, so I figure if it’s good enough for them it’s good enough for me.
The problem is that the pro photographers only seem to review the $500+ wide-carriage high end photo printers, which is far more than I need or want eating up my desk space at home. So while they’re good for figuring out whether Canon, HP or Epson are capable of manufacturing a quality printer, they’re not really useful for me to figure out what would be a good $150-$200 printer to sit on my desk.
The problem with the other categories of printer reviews is that nobody seems to review everything, not even CNET. Printer manufacturers don’t make this any easier by having product cycles shorter than the average fruit fly’s lifespan. Epson and Canon seem to be generally on top, but they also seem to trade places every six months or less, and it’s tough to figure out who to buy at the moment.
I had it narrowed down to two specific printers (for reasons which are unlikely to become clear at the moment) and found that nowhere was there a site that had reviewed both models. Sites had reviews of one, or the other, but not both. Not even CNET. This sucks because when comparing opinions it’s hard to tell how qualifications compare between sites, and it ends up being a lot of reading to try to get a feel for the site and reviewer.
In the end, I read tons of reviews, and then just… picked one. Seriously, it was barely more informed than flipping a coin.
Why have you failed me, Internet?
