The secret's in the fine print

Gizmo Gallery

Printers will soon be coming out of my ears "" I have reviewed half a dozen printers this year! Printer-makers like Hewlett-Packard, Canon, Lexmark, Samsung and Epson are so aggressively wooing the Asian PC market, especially the home and small office segments, with relatively inexpensive variants that gizmo reviewers like me get flooded with different boxes doing the same function.

The latest printer I ran some tests on recently was Epson's Stylus C82 Ink Jet printer. For an inkjet printer, the Epson machine comes across a mite expensive at Rs 10,650, but remember this is a four-colour (in separate cartridges) machine. Further, the machine has more than a few good things going for it, especially if you want your prints really fast and render photos from a digital camera.

The Epson C82 is rated to print 22 pages of monochrome text in a minute and 11 pages in colour. This is admirable speed, as most of us who have used older and cheaper inkjet printers know, but your mileage drops if you choose an option better than draft quality. Still, I think the Epson C82 is among the faster inkjet printers I've used.

The second big plus of the Epson C82 is the high resolution you can set, which is very useful while printing images. It is capable of printing a very fine resolution of 5760x 1440 dots per inch (dpi).

According to Epson, the C82 can produce droplets as small as three picolitres. One picolitre is a millionth of a litre. Depending on the resolution they churn out, printers can squeeze out 3-4 picolitres to 25 picolitres per droplet from their cartridge. The Epson C82 scores well in this department.

Epson uses something called 'DURABrite' ink in its cartridges, which it says are waterproof and stable lasting many years. My experience with photo-printing with other printers has not been too great in this regard and I would be happy with Epson if its image-prints last long. Like many from the crossover generation, I like clicking with a digital camera, but would prefer my photographs filed in an album.

Due to its fine resolution-printing and four-cartridge design, the Epson C82 produces quite remarkable colours. This can be very useful even when making copies of presentations that need a high resolution and the exact colour (say, in a corporate logo) needs to be reproduced repeatedly. Keeping business users in mind, the machine has a roomy paper tray that can hold 150 sheets.

The black cartridge of the Epson C82 retails at Rs 1,430, while each of the three colour cartridges sell for Rs 635. On paper usage, the manufacturer says under "3.5 per cent ink coverage", the black cartridge prints 1,240 pages.

In English, that means each black cartridge can print 1,240 pages each having 1,200 characters in Times New Roman font at the rate of 10 characters per inch (in normal mode of printing, that is, 360 x 360 dpi). Similarly, colour cartridges last for 420 pages of 940 characters each.

The Epson C82 has a thoughtful and pleasing design. The input and output trays both fold snugly against the printer when not loaded with paper, saving desk space and keeping dust out of the printer. It has a 'Print Cancel' button on the console too .

The only negative point I can spot with the printer is the tardy quality print-outs if you try to save on ink "" and, therefore, costs "" by using the printer on low-quality mode. Small text can fade at times and close lines can overlap to produce a broad band rather than the discrete effect intended.

For those who find the Epson C82 expensive, there are some cheaper printers from Seiko Epson Corp. There is the C43sx model that sells at Rs 3,500, the C61 at Rs 6,500 and the SP830 at Rs 9,000 each.

(Josey Puliyenthuruthel works with content company perZuade. His views are personal and may not be endorsed by his employers, the company's investors, customers or vendors. Comments may be sent to josey@perzuade.com)