As a rough rule of thumb, inkjet printers are better suited to printing photographs, where they can offer good image quality, and laser printers are better suited to documents, because they are cheaper to run.

This poses quite a problem for anyone running a home office: you have to print out business letters, invoices and various other documents; but you also want to print photographs of your friends, weddings, holidays and so on. You only want to buy one printer, so which technology do you invest in?

This month we’ve been looking at a range of inkjets that aim to solve this problem. Inkjet technology offers a number of advantages over its laser alternative. Firstly, image quality tends to be much better, as even the cheapest inkjet printers offer higher resolution than a laser printer. Secondly, inkjet inks are better at resisting fading, and they work with a wider range of media, from standard copy paper to high-quality glossy photo paper.

In addition, inkjet printers are relatively cheap to buy, making them both easy to replace and reasonably cost effective for printing small numbers of documents. However, you should note that the hidden cost of the inks required will push up the cost of ownership over time.

For our test we’ve included HP’s D7160, Lexmark’s new Z1420, two of Canon’s Pixma range (the iP2500 and iP5300), and Epson’s Stylus D92 and R360. This market sample offers a mix of value, image quality, and speed.

In order to compare print speeds we printed out a 10 page A4 PDF document made up of text with some headings in colour, using the appropriate normal, standard or document quality settings, depending on what the driver offered, but avoiding the Best and Draft settings. We timed the print speed from the moment we pressed the print button, to the time the last page left the printer. None of the printers came anywhere close to the stated page per minute speeds, though some were considerably faster than others.

We also printed out a standard colour chart and a selection of photographs to check print speed and quality, using the best or photo quality settings, all at A4 size. Most of these printers achieved a similar level of print quality, though some of the drivers offered much better control over the image.

Several of these printers also offered extra features, such as printing direct to CDs, or having built-in card readers, and even the cheapest printers came complete with media and additional software.

Buying Advice

Between them, these six printers give a pretty good indication of the kind of features you can expect to find on a colour inkjet printer. All of them involve some level of compromise, so in choosing a colour inkjet printer for your home office you have to work out which features matter most to you.

If price is important to you, then the Epson D92 is the cheapest printer here. It is extremely slow to print, but it does separate the inks into four separate tanks, which in theory should make it cheaper to run because you won’t need to replace ink that isn’t empty. However it is fairly lightweight and clearly not built for much abuse, although it is cheap enough to be easily replaced.

If you are likely to be printing lots of colour documents, factor in the cost of inks or you’ll find what looked like a low-price printer turns out to be a money guzzler. We’ve estimated the price per page based on the manufacturer’s quoted total number of page yields for each ink tank and then divided the total price of all the ink tanks by the total number of pages to get a price per page, in pence. The manufacturers use the same ISO standard to express their page yields so this should be comparable, but it may not reflect the kind of printing you may do.

Canon’s Pixma iP2500 is only slightly more expensive, but is a much faster and more stylish machine, though not any more robust. Nonetheless we felt this deserved a special mention as a great budget buy.

The Lexmark Z1420 was the only printer to offer WiFi, and this is certainly a very cool feature to have. However, we didn’t feel that this really justified the price, on what is otherwise a very slow and fairly flimsy printer. If wireless printing is important to you then you could just as easily add a wireless print server to any other printer for not too much extra cost.

There’s little to choose between the Epson R360 and HP’s D7160. They both cost the same, and offer similar features, however the pictures from the D7160 look a little flat, whereas the prints from the R360 were crisp and vibrant, comparable with a dedicated photo printer.

Canon’s iP5300 was the fastest printer in our tests, but then it was the most expensive. It looks good, and doesn’t take up too much space on the desktop. The iP5300 also has a lot of well thought out features, and was the only printer on test to offer duplexing as standard, which in a lot of office situations could prove to be extremely useful. This unit’s versatility may make this the safest buy for many users.

However, we’ve awarded the top prize to the Epson R360. We felt that the card reader was probably a more useful function for most people than the iP5300’s duplexing, which was quite slow. The R360’s image quality is much better than the D7160’s and it is slightly cheaper than the iP5300, too.