What inkjet printer for photos?
 

It's time to join the 21st century and upgrade from my Epson Stylus 640 to a bettr printer. The Epson has served me well and is still going strong but since I purchased a digi camera the photo quality is unacceptable. Budget is £100 and speed and size are not an issue. I read a review for an HP 5150 and it sounded good. Does anyone have any recommendations?

Cheers
MOTM

We use Epson Stylus Photo's at work (A4 + A3 colour printing) and they work really well. I suggest though that you look at a few reviews, and make sure you are happy with the cost of the inks etc before buying.

HP photosmarts are great printers. I've always rated HPs have the best paperhandling

But one thing gets them...the cartridges...the photoprinter use number "56" "57" and "58" model number cartridges, which are not very high capacity and not cheap (you need to mail order to get decent prices).

The problem is that the "photo" cartridge (no 58) will only print about 35 sheets of A4 photopaper on high resolution before starting to run out on one of the colours

To compare, I bought a cannon i965 which takes 7 seperate cartridges instead of 2, Ive printed about 100 high quality pictures on A4 photopaper and loads of other junk on draft normal paper and I've only had to replace 2 of the 7 cartridges so far :) Plus it will print right to the edge of the paper without any borders and the qulaity of the printed photos are far superior to the HP's. On the downside is its paper handling and non-photo printing is nowhere near as good as the HP.

So, the cannon is more expensive to buy, but for solely printing photos on photo paper it is cheaper to run than a cheaper Hewlet packard due to costs in cartridges (£20+ per cartridge for HP, £7ish for the Cannon) - bearing in mind when one colour runs out on a HP or any other printer that uses tri-colour cartridges you have to chuck the whole lot.