Six inks really DO make for better pictures!

Printer technologies have really come a long way in recent history. They're smaller and faster, come with many bells and whistles, in dozens of form factors. But let's face it - unless you're just going to print boarding passes and black-and-white recipes, having a printer capable of making pretty pictures is very attractive. Having a printer that will make pretty pictures, print on CDs, and cost under $100 is even better.

Enter the Epson R260.

There are a couple of factors that will impact the quality of prints you can get from an inkjet printer. These include printer's maximum resolution and the number of colors of ink it uses.

All images printed by an inkjet printer are essentially comprised of tiny dots of ink on the page. The number of dots (listed as DPI, dots per inch) determines the fineness of the image. More dots (higher DPI) means smaller dots and a finer image. You can imagine how much finer an image would be if one used a fine-point marker to make the dots compared to a pencil eraser. The R260 has a comparable - or higher! - maximum resolution compared to other inkjet printers in this price range (under $100)!

The other significant variable is the number of colors available to print. The first color printers used four ink colors to make a print - cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (also called CMYK). This allowed most of the colors in between to be achieved using a sum of the ink tones; cyan & and yellow make green in printing, the same way blue and yellow make green in paints.

Since cyan and magenta are relatively dark colors, traditional 3-color inkjet printers have difficulty achieving lighter mixed shades. The only way to make a 3-color inkjet image appear lighter is to use larger spaces between dots, making the resulting images grainy. (This is called halftoning.)

A 6-color inkjet printer uses cyan, light cyan, magenta, light magenta, yellow, and black (CcMmYK) to create a print. The two lighter shades of cyan and magenta allow for a lighter mix of colors. (You can read more about CMYK and CcMmYK at Wikipedia. Some printers use 8 colors, adding light yellow and gray [light black] to the mix, but they are often in a higher price range.)

Most of the modern inkjet printers being produced by Epson, HP, and others use at least 6 colors. One huge cost savings of the Epson R260 over others is the use of six individual ink cartridges. When you run out of cyan (after printing all your beach vacation photos), you only have to replace ONE CARTRIDGE - the cyan - at a cost of about $14.

There's also one technologically interesting difference between Epson print-heads and others is that Epson uses a piezoelectric material to release ink, as opposed to other brands thermal elements. That makes it really neat, in my opinion, but I'm a materials nerd.

There's a bonus feature on this printer that I wasn't aware of until I got it home. It has a tray that can be loaded with a printable CD. The printer will print directly onto that CD to provide it with a full-color label without the complications of stickers. That's pretty cool.

In conclusion, if you've got $100 burning a hole in your pocket and you need a new printer, I highly recommend the Epson R260. It provides exceptional print quality for the dollar value and some longer-term cost savings based on individual ink cartridges.

Interesting articles on the art/science of printer images:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkjet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMYK
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halftoning