When George Bush appoints me to the Federal Trade Commission, one of
my first proposals is going to be a regulation requiring printer makers to add
a big, bold asterisk wherever they use the phrase "up to" in describing how
many pages per minute their products will print.
And I won't let them off the hook with a footnote as vacuous as "Actual
results may vary." I'll suggest something like "Don't pay any attention to
this number -- you'll be lucky to get half of it in real life."
What prompts this fantasy is a round of tests I just ran on three new
printers advertised as delivering speeds of "up to" 11, 15, and 17 pages per
minute, respectively. In some ways, all three are excellent products -- I'll
have more to say about their virtues in a future column -- but none comes
close to its "up to" speed.
And that's just one of several traps the industry has placed in the way of
unwary printer buyers.
FEEDS AND SPEEDS
To test the vendors' performance claims, I printed out a 17.5-page document,
containing nothing but about 350 words of text on each page, several times on
each printer. The best results I got came from the 15 pages-per-minute model,
a Samsung ML-1430 laser printer. It did the job in 2 minutes 46 seconds -- 6.4
p.p.m.
The "up to 17 p.p.m." model, a Hewlett-Packard PSC 2210, took 4 minutes 25
seconds (just over 4 p.p.m.) in its normal mode and almost 3 minutes in
FastDraft mode, its speediest setting.
Bringing up the rear was the Lexmark X75 PrinTrio, which is rated at 11 p.p.
m. It needed more than 6 minutes to print my 17.5 pages in normal mode (less
than 3 p.p.m.) and 4:08 minutes at the "QuickPrint" setting.
In short, none of these printers delivered even half its rated speed, even
when in the fastest mode.
The spec that's supposed to tell you what you can expect in terms of
quality can be just as misleading. That indicator is resolution -- the number
of dots per inch (d.p.i.) the printer can lay down on your page. The higher
the d.p.i., the sharper the text and the subtler the shading in graphics,
according to the theory.
Unfortunately, it doesn't always work that way, because not all dots are
created equal -- the quality of the output depends not only on how many of
them there are, but also on how precisely they're aimed and shaped, the kind
of ink they're made of, whether they bleed on their neighbors and a host of
other technical variables.
This all becomes obvious when you compare text output from laser and inkjet
printers. Lots of inkjets now deliver "near-laser quality," but few, if any,
actually get there.
When I look at the crisp text emerging from the Samsung ML-1430, it looks
pretty much like professional printing, even though the printer costs only
$200 and boasts a relatively modest resolution of 600 by 600 d.p.i.
By contrast, the two other printers, both inkjets, have significantly
higher resolutions -- 2,400 by 1,200 d.p.i. in the case of the Lexmark X75 and
up to 1,200 by 1,200 d.p.i. for text from the HP PSC 2210. But even in their
best (and slowest) modes, their output on plain paper looked to me like, well,
inkjet output -- not bad, but just a bit blurry and soggy-looking.
That's what you get, I'm afraid, when you print by squirting droplets of
hot liquid ink at the page -- no matter how many such droplets per inch the
printer can squirt.
PENNIES PER PAGE
At $200, the Samsung printer is amazingly cheap for a laser printer, but
it's still more than most consumer inkjets. On the other hand, if you generate
lots of text pages, and can live without color printing (or have another way
to do it), there's another powerful argument for lasers: the toner they use
generally costs less per page than inkjet ink.
The ML-1430 comes with a cartridge rated for 1,000 average pages, and
replacement cartridges good for 2,500 pages go for $70. You can stretch the
page count for either one by 40 percent, according to Samsung, just by
pressing the TonerSaver button on the front of the printer. (On most pages,
the difference in output quality is barely visible.)
That comes out to a range of 2 to 2.8 cents per page. I can't tell you
exactly how that compares with the Lexmark X75, the HP PSC 2210, or other
inkjets, because the vendors don't make such information readily accessible,
and I don't have the time, money or patience to print through whole cartridges
just to calculate ink costs. But trade magazines that have done such testing
generally come up with much higher per-page costs for inkjets.
At PCWorld.com, for example, the test reports accompanying a feature posted
this month on "Top 10 Inkjet Printers" shows an average per-page cost of 4.5
cents for monochrome printing. (For color printing, the average was 12.7 cents
per page.) Only three inkjet printers -- two of them from Canon, interestingly
-- were in the same range per page as the Samsung laser printer.
There's a reason printer manufacturers don't talk much about the cost of
consumables for their products: that's where the money is in their business.
They've adopted the proverbial razor-and-razor-blades strategy, making the
printers (razors) cheap but soaking us on the ink (blades).
This is especially the case with the cheapest printers, those that are
bundled "free" with PCs or sold for less than $100. In some cases these come
with special "starter" cartridges that are only half-full, or there's no black
cartridge, so unwitting consumers use up their expensive color ink to produce
pseudo-black when printing text. Either way, the buyer who's taken home a
printer for, say, $49, has to go back a few weeks later and shell out $30 or
more for a replacement cartridge.
In fact, in an excellent overview of printer options published last
December, PC Magazine chose to exclude sub-$100 printers on the grounds that
"in the end, these are by far the most expensive to own and operate" (www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,5217,00.asp).
CABLE MADNESS
Another way printer makers have traditionally stuck it to customers is by
not providing cables with their products. And often they add insult to injury
by trying to sell you one for $20 or more.
Don't fall for it. In most cases these days, all you need to connect your
printer and computer is a standard USB "device cable," and you can get a
perfectly good one anywhere, probably for a lot less than your printer vendor
wants. If you can't find one at a good price locally, try the Web -- Amazon.
com, Buy.com and other reputable e-commerce sites offer high-quality, name-
brand USB cables for less than $5 apiece.
LEGISLATIVE UPDATE
Amazingly enough, the CRT-recycling bills I mentioned here recently -- SB
1523 and SB 1619 -- actually passed the state Legislature on Aug. 31, the
final, frenzied night of this year's session.
I'm not happy about some of the changes that had to be made to get the
votes -- in particular, the upfront fee to be charged with the sale of CRT-
based products was set at $10, regardless of the size of the screen. That
might suffice for most computer monitors, but it's certainly not enough to
cover the cost of safely recycling big-screen TVs.
Still, the bills are an important first step because they finally create a
viable framework for dealing with the looming e-waste crisis. Now the question
is whether Gov. Gray Davis will sign them or back down in the face of industry
pressure. If you want him to do what's obviously the right thing, now's the
time to let him know. You can find details about the bills and a sample letter
to the governor at www.recycling.net.
