Introduction
The evolution in ink-jet technology in the last two years has been breathtaking. Every manufacturer such as; Hewlett Packard, Epson, Lexmark amongst others has had a hand in instigating to bring about these changes. What a change it's been, you only have to look back a few years, when the technology in its infancy was barely 200dpi in colour printing at a crawling speed of 2ppm, this would set you back around £500.00 with no change. With this in mind, we decided to set the price point of ink-jet printers costing no more than £200.00 plus VAT, affordable for the sophisticated home and office user. This being our first ink-jet printer group test, we were keen to see which models the manufacturers would submit to our labs.

How we carried out our tests
Apart from the obvious price tag comparison our objective in this test was to ascertain the best print quality against print speed. We achieved this by using three pre-prepared test documents.

Document One - A two-page monochrome (Black) text document consisting of a single font at variable sizes from 8 through 72 points, and the second page consisting of bold and underlined characters.

Document Two - A ten-page manual with various fonts and sizes with screen capture images in 256 colours and also a page of text with paragraphs in different colours.

Document Three - A 1200dpi scanned fine art image, size: 210mm (H) x 150mm (W). (See Figure 1)

Figure 2 - Test Results

The test results are shown in minutes and seconds