Pinnacle Pro901 produced the best color prints in our roundup and very good black-and-whites, too. Scanning was a weak spot, with iffy color accuracy and text that looked a bit squished—although it did boast the quickest scan speed. Setup was a total breeze, and using the unit is a snap thanks to a spacious touchscreen display with an intuitive interface. That it costs just $200 merely seals the deal.

WIRED Compact, with a sturdy build and stylish design. Black ink cartridge costs five bucks. Includes a USB cable.

TIRED No CF card slot. Small paper tray (150 sheets). Slightly dark color prints.

$200, lexmark.com

2. Epson Artisan 835

The Epson looks good on the outside, but its output is mostly average. Copies and scans are fast, but quality is weak. So what does the Artisan excel at? Making maintenance painless and easy: Replacing ink cartridges is as simple as flipping up a panel and snapping in new ones. A bounty of options are available right from the touchscreen control panel, from printing passport photos and contact sheets (useful) to turning pictures into coloring-book pages (cute, but useless).

WIRED Massive number of printing modes. Speedy color prints that look good, too. Superfast copies.

TIRED Photos so overloaded with ink that they feel soggy. Scan colors look vibrant yet are wildly inaccurate.

$300, epson.com

3. Canon Pixma MG6120

Neither color nor black-and-white prints from the MG6120 were stellar; we could see chunkiness and fuzziness in photo details. But its scans and copies were the best of the bunch, with nearly dead-on color accuracy in scanned images. Yet it’s overpriced for its feature set, ditching essentials like automatic document feed in an attempt to keep the its footprint small.

WIRED Gorgeous copies and scans; great choice if you don’t actually use your printer for, you know, printing. Small and sophisticated design tucks away easily.

TIRED Stingy paper tray (150 sheets). Massive setup headaches, with uncommonly buggy software. Tiny display panel with confusing controls.

$200, canon.com

4. HP Officejet Pro 8500 Wireless All-in-One

Festooned with more buttons and flair than a TGI Friday’s, the Officejet Pro 8500 is old-school nostalgia in an era of streamlined design. The big advantage is black-and-white printing: We got more than 15 pages per minute of near laser-printer quality. Scans were slow but outstanding. But we had huge problems printing in color: There was significant and obvious banding—glossy photos were all but unusable. Color accuracy was great, but without proper alignment, that gets you nowhere.

WIRED Outstanding text quality and printing speed.

TIRED Unit is bulky and heavy. No Windows 7 support included on the CD (hello, 356-MB download!). Slow copy speed..

$300, hp.com

See Also:

• HP Photosmart A646 Compact Photo Printer – Wired News
• Lunch Pail-Sized Portable Printer Makes Pictures Pop
• PoGo Printer Spits Pics on the Quick
• Fujitsu ScanSnap S300 Scans And Delivers
• For Printers, 'All-In-One' Really Means 'Way-Too-Much'

Authors: Christopher Null

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