G'day. I just bought a Canon Ixus - pictures are of great quality.

My wife is extremely keen to buy a printer which has the ability for high quality photo prints. Please give me ur opinion. Im even keen to here about dedicated photo printers.

Appreciate the advice Cheers from Australia

-- Dundee (adams@cyberone.com.au), July 19, 2000

Answers

If you're primarily going to be printing 4x6" snapshots, take a serious look at the Sony UP-DP10 dye-sub printer. Excellent print quality, easy to use, and fairly economical. You can then just use one of the many online photofinishers, (ezprints.com, shutterfly.com, ofoto.com, printroom.com, ...), for those times you want larger prints like 5x7 or 8x10.

-- Brad Grant (bradandsteph@home.com), July 19, 2000.

Asking for "the best photo quality printer" isn't much help unless you also give some idea about your budget. The best one is probably some $100,000+ digital printing press.

For slightly smaller budgets, it seems generally accepted that Epson makes the best photo ink jet printers. The new Photo 870 is suppose to be very nice, and is available for less than $300. Prints have very long life due to special inks or somesuch.

Another Epson choice might be the slightly older Photo 750. The advantage here would be the availability of cheaper third party ink cartridges. (The 870 cartridges have a special chip - 3d party inks are not available). I've also heard good things about the Epson 900.

-- Greg Philmon (gphilmon@yahoo.com), July 19, 2000.

Epson is at the top of the heap. the 870 ink and paper combination provides a 25 year display life, prints borderless 4X6 prints with the roll adaptor. You can even get the 870DC that connects directly to a digital camera without a computer. The print quality is photo quality. The only way you will be able to distinguish a print from this and a conventional photographic print will be to look at the back of the paper to determine the type. If you want a larger size print go to the epson 1270 but you will need to use either altamira genuine fractals or a dedicated film or print scanner to get the most out of a 13" X44" print

-- Jonathan Ratzlaff (jonathanr@clrtech.com), July 19, 2000.

thanks for the answers appreciate it,

Greg, ur right i should have left a price.....probably something up to $AUS 1000 which is about $600 US at the moment normally $700. Thanks......hope you can suggest something more than $300 which you would consider worth it...worth it for the double money.

Cheers Mate

-- Dundee (adams@cyberone.com.au), July 20, 2000.

I don't think you'll be able to get much better prints than the Epson 870, even at twice the price. Check out some of the online reviews. As someone above mentioned, there is a larger version of the same printer (it takes larger paper). But unless you need to print on larger sheets, why bother?

For more money, you might be able to find something a bit faster. And you could take a look at the various dye-sub printers. But the ones in your price range would be limited to 3x5 or 4x6 prints. The Epson inkjet is significantly more versatile.

-- Greg Philmon (gphilmon@yahoo.com), July 20, 2000.

Oh come Greg, we can spend more of his money if he wants to. Go for the Epson 875DC and you can just slide your memory card into the printer and print away (we are talking digital aren't we). And then there is the larger version of the 870...the 1270? But Dundee can check them out at http://www.epson.com/printer/

(I own the 870 and like it very much.)

-- bill (this_old_house@pobox.com), July 20, 2000.