Today's color printers are fairly sophisticated beasts: Their software drivers let you choose from a range of settings where you can optimize the output for speed, quality, or both. That's great for consumers but tough for magazines that want to compare speed and output. So to test these 12 color laser printers, we asked the manufacturers which driver settings they would recommend for our test documents, which mixed text and color graphics from typical office applications.
Print a test page online. This is a page for testing printers by the use of A4 Printer test pages. Simple and one-click printer testing. For testing your printers Black and White Test Page Color Test Page Want something else?, please tell me about it here. HP Diagnostic print test colors (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and black) All in one.
First, we asked for the settings that would produce the highest-quality color graphics and photos, and we rated each printer's output of ten test documents. This series of tests, created specifically for PC Magazine Labs analysis, enabled us to check for line and edge quality, dithering (a dot pattern in what should be a smooth color), posterization (abrupt color transitions that should be unnoticeable), oversaturation (too-intense color), and misregistration (where colors are not properly aligned).
We then asked for the settings that would optimize performance. We printed ten documents, and the results of those tests are presented here. (For details and more information, go to our Web site, www.pcmag.com.)
Several factors converge to affect a printer's throughput: the type of engine used, the speed of the processor in the printer, the efficiency of the printer control language and firmware, the amount of RAM available to rasterize (draw) the image to be printed, and more. In general, the in-line printers (which lay down all four colors in a single pass of the paper) were faster than their traditional counterparts (where the paper travels four times around a rotating drum). But there is a tradeoff: At the speeds shown here, image quality suffered—but just a little. We saw some registration problems, which are common for in-line engines. These printers are capable of delivering high-quality graphics, but you'll have to sacrifice some speed.
On our image-quality tests (not included in the performance test charts), the HP LaserJet 8550DN, Lexmark C720N, and Minolta-QMS magicolor 2200 DeskLaser fared the best overall—though it's important to note that none of the printers received a poor or fair rating. Color laser technology has matured to the point where even the worst models deliver good results.—Analysis written by Glenn Menin
How WeTested
We worked with QualityLogic (www.qualitylogic.com) to develop a customized test suite to record performance data, based on the Rational Visual Test programming platform and QualityLogic's Page Sense 2.01—a system that employs an LED sensor to track various data points throughout the printing process. Our system generated last page out timings (how much time elapsed before the last page of the document was ejected and resting in the output tray) and return to application timings (the delay after selecting the Print command until control of the mouse and keyboard are returned to the user).
For our sample documents (our test targets), we chose files that mimicked the range of jobs a typical office might create. These included documents created in the popular Microsoft Office 2000 applications (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint), as well as common graphics and publishing programs (Adobe Acrobat 4.0 and Adobe Photoshop 6.0). Some of our results appear here; the rest are available online. Here's a rundown of the documents we used for both quality and speed tests:
• Microsoft PowerPoint. This presentation program provides a typical slide show with template backgrounds. The document we used was heavy on both vector and bitmap elements.
• Microsoft Excel. Our five documents represented several charts and graphs in different page orientations. Maintaining 0.5-weight stroke lines on a solid black background proved a challenge for many printers.
Printer Test Page
• Microsoft Word. Eight documents of various content and length stressed each printer's ability to output a wide range of typefaces and formatting, along with graphics and embedded elements such as charts and graphs.
• Adobe Acrobat 4.0. We output a four-page PDF document with several graphic elements from this application, chosen for its universal appeal. PDFs are used increasingly as a means of providing product documentation and are often available in downloadable form on Web sites.
Color Printer Test Page Epson
• Adobe Photoshop 6.0. An 8- by 10-inch photo image (a TIFF) provided a rasterizing challenge.
Color Printer Test Page Pdf Download Free
All output was produced on 20-pound, general-purpose laser paper. Our client PC was a Dell Dimension XPS B866r, with a Pentium III processor, running Windows 98 SE, with a 30GB EIDE hard drive, 128MB of RAM, and a 100Base-T PCI card communicating via the TCP/IP and IPX protocols. We used two servers, one running Windows 2000 and the other NetWare 5.1, to test for compatibility. Each server was a Dell Dimension with a 1-GHz Pentium III processor, 256MB of RAM, and a 100Base-T PCI card running TCP/IP.