I have the olympus 2020 digcam. And now looking for a very good quality printer? Don't know what to buy?...thermal or injet printer? looking to spend up to $500.

thanks

-- phat dinh (mrphatdinh@hotmail.com), June 12, 2000

Answers

It seems generally accepted that Epson makes the best inkjet photo printers. The new Photo 870 is suppose to be fantastic. Of course, you need good (expensive) paper.

Check www.pricescan.com and/or www.pricegrabber.com for good prices.

What I'm doing is exhausting all of the various free print offers from digital processors. Off the top of my head: Yahoo Photos: 100 free prints Shutterfly: 100 free prints Excite Photos: 50 free prints Ofotos: 50 free prints PhotoAccess: 50 free prints

Geez, I may never buy a printer!

-- Greg Philmon (gphilmon@yahoo.com), June 12, 2000.

I purchased a Epson Stylus C2 printer about 6 years ago and it has never let me down.The print quality is great and having both a black ink cartridge and a coloured ink cartridge is a plus.It may not be as fast as some other printer's on the market but i haven't come across any other's that can match it over all. I purchased mine from Business Depot check them out,your $500.00 should be close.

-- Duke (Duke@gtn.on.ca), June 28, 2000.

I'm on the Epson bandwagon too. I have an Epson 760 which makes marvelous prints for a 4 color printer. I bought it after comparing the output from the 6 color 750 and not being sufficiently impressed to spend nearly double to get it. If I were doing it again soon, I'd probably take a long hard look at the 870 and 1270, as well. The archival qualities of the ink & paper are marvelous. The only downside is the cost of consummables and being locked into buying them only from Epson because the new ink monitoring chips in the cartridges prevent third parties from manufacturing them.

You'll be hard pressed to beat the print quality. If you like HP's printers some of the newer models produce very nice looking prints from the samples I've collected, but Epson blows them away on initial outlay. The better HP's are several times more expensive for high quality 4 color output. I'm not sure of the cost of HP consummables vs. Epson's cost.

Perhaps the best way to decide is to get print samples from local dealers like CompUSA where you can actually look at a bunch of printers and see what you think of them. If you really want good comparisons buy a pack of Epson's photo paper for $10 and you'll get 20 sheets of heavy photo paper that you can get store employees to run through the printers so you can see how well they print on photo paper. You really can't evaluate the different printers' outputs based on the cheap paper. It's worth $10 to get a good evaluation of their capabilities and you can use the rest of the pack with whichever you buy... :-)

Good Luck!

-- Gerald M. Payne (gmp@francomm.com), June 29, 2000.