Josey Puliyenthuruthel: For picture-perfect prints

GIZMO GALLERY

One thumb rule that has worked well with me while buying personal technology gizmos is to hunt for a median-priced product in the market from a trusted brand, do some research and pick it up.

I've burnt my fingers picking up the cheapest gadgets in a category. A low-end Canon printer-fax-scanner-copier I purchased in 2000 used to bleed me with high-cost cartridges that barely last 30-40 pages and I'm still struggling to get a cheap D-Link wireless router bought in the US up and running despite the company's global service operations.

At the top end, I have found expensive gadgets gypping "" not because they don't work properly, but because I always felt the value they deliver kind of sub-optimal.

Examples range from O2's XDA handhelds to Bluetooth-enabled devices to fancy expensive "surround sound" music systems. My personal take on these "" and other similarly tagged gizmos "" has been that they would provide excellent value if they were priced about 15-20 per cent cheaper.

Canon's Pixma iP5000 photo printer vindicates my "median price, good value" axiom. It is not cheap for a photo printer at nearly Rs 17,000 (there are HP models at half that price), but produces excellent photo prints and packs in some nifty features even when used as an all-purpose inkjet printer.

Setting up the printer for use is not the easiest of tasks. For one, the printer does not ship with a USB cable (to connect the printer to a PC), which can be quite irritating for a first-time user.

Then, the installation of the printer software and drivers can take longer than similar crank-ups with other printers: it took about six minutes for me to install the Canon Pixma software (occupying a clunky 280MB of space) and another couple of minutes to get the printer head alignment done.

That done, to open the iP5000 you must push the front panel inwards, which then releases a small catch allowing you to extend a paper catcher.

The top paper feeder is hidden under a flap that also holds a stack of paper with a tight paper guide lever.

The iP5000 also has a front loading paper tray that slides into the bottom of the printer. It can hold up to 150 sheets of plain paper with helpful markings for A4, 5x7 and 6x4 sized paper.

I found this compartment useful while printing pictures, but confusing while taking normal text print outs. The printer software always throws up an error message on the PC screen if the front loading paper tray is empty, in spite of having paper in the top paper feeder.

I am sure there is a way to bust this bug, but I couldn't quite manage to do so.

All my cribs, however, vanished after some test print outs. The photo prints were simply superb. This is mainly thanks to 9600 x 2400 dpi (dots per inch) resolution it is capable of and the use of five-ink print cartridges that generate tiny 1 pico-litre ink-drop sizes.

I took standard 6" by 4" photo prints on Canon high-glossy paper and also some larger prints on some locally sourced matte paper. Both were good quality print outs "" easily comparable with photo lab quality prints.

The iP5000 also fared well in more mundane text printing tasks. What I particularly liked was the double-side printing option.

Unlike other printers meant for home or small offices that require users to feed in paper (one side of which has been printed) back into the machine manually, the iP5000 automatically sucks a sheet of one-side-printed paper back into the printer to continue printing on the other side and then spews it out.

This is a useful feature when print volumes run into, say, 50 pages or more per document.

The other cool feature of the iP5000 is its ability to print labels on CDs.

With this, you can dispense with the shabbily-scrawled marker-pen labels on CDs and DVDs; instead, all you have to do is place a CD or DVD in the CD tray, insert into the slot provided making sure the alignment arrows are in a line and have a neatly-labeled disk returned in seconds.

I impressed a friend with a personalised label on a CD he wanted.

Photo printers have been in the Indian market for a year or more now and as the months go by, I'm sure there will be cheaper photo printers introduced by the likes of HP, Epson and Canon itself.

At this point in time, however, the iP5000 offers good value and may be a worthwhile investment if you're looking for shot-to-album ownership of your photographs.

(Comments to Josey Puliyenthuruthel can be sent to <P align="right> josey@vsnl.net