PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS
The Labs team breaks out another few reams of paper to work out who is king of the inkjet multi function mountain.
When evaluating multi-function devices there are four determining factors for ascertaining who has really got the goods. These are speed, quality, features and price.
Performance
We ran two printer spool tests, which are a blank A4 page with a single full stop in the centre. We printed single- and 10-page runs to gauge start up and print time to determine the maximum possible speed of the printer.
The other major component of our speed testing was timed scan runs at the highest optical resolution supported by the scanners. For this test we used the same image from our scanner Labs roundup, with skin tones being a good indicator for scan quality, given the prolificacy of photographic scanning. Each image was compared objectively first, then relatively to give it a score from 1 to 10 – 10 being excellent quality.
Speed also included OCR testing; this involved scanning, at 300dpi, a single heavily-formatted page of text in the form of a letter, and translating it to text via the included optical recognition software. This test was used to gauge both speed and performance, as each recognised page was scrutinised for typographical and formatting errors and again awarded a 1 to 10 point score.
These were then added, and normalised across the range to highlight the deviation from the norm. 100 represents the average score across the MFDs tested.
Quality
Text quality is typically excellent these days, with generally only very cheap printers producing poor quality text. Our test page was made up of various sized fonts, ranging from the very small 6pt to a much larger 18pt, of both black and white text and reversed on a 50 percent grey background. We looked for poorly formed text and feathering at small sized fonts, particularly text on the grey background.
The high level of subtle tone changes in the image below the sized fonts makes it a perfect test for banding and dithering checking. We awarded scores to rank the printers by best quality.
We printed the colour matrix on semi-gloss photographic paper, which consists of a series of coloured C (cyan) M (magenta) Y (yellow) and K (black) bars as well as gradients between colours. We looked for smooth or erratic gradients between colours, blending and brightness of colours and marked each accordingly.
Again, these quality scores were normalised to reflect a weighting of the group. 100 is the average.
Features
Features scores were rated on the specifications of the MFDs. These ranged from scores of five for below average, 10 for average, and 15 for excellent, depending on the feature. Where specifications were not supplied or refused by the manufacturer, we award half the below average score.
We looked at the printer, copier, scanner and fax functionality of the MFDs, and awarded points for things like print processor and RAM, monthly duty cycle, colour and monochrome capabilities, print resolution, scan resolution, fax-to-fax capabilities, fax to email, copy modes, connectivity and more.
Performance Analysis
Like most Labs we conduct at PC Authority, there are always clear winners in every category. For print times there was little difference, although the high res CMYK print proved to be the most taxing for the MFDs to cope with, and sorted the wheat from the chaff. In this case, the Lexmark P3150 was the slowest by far with over 12 minutes to print, while the Canon imageCLASS MP730 took under two minutes.
For general performance though, it was hard to beat either the Epson Stylus CX3100 or the other Lexmark, the X6150. Both were impressive with their ability to scan and print documents in short time.
Quality is a different matter – as it doesn't matter how fast a printer works if the output is illegible. Fortunately, all of the MFDs scored within a very narrow range of high quality.
Scores
We weighted the scores for the MFDs, with the value score being a calculation of performance (20 percent), quality (20 percent) and features (60 percent) divided by price. These weightings were determined by the shopper's thinking – for low-cost MFDs the feature set is the more important factor.
The overall score was determined by averaging the performance, features and value scores.