The 964's saving grace is its constellation of AIO features, with scanning, standalone copying and faxing, the 50-page ADF, and the ability to fax from your PC. If you don't protect your photos behind glass or plastic, be prepared to reprint them if they get ruined from handling. Note too that even after a photo has had plenty of time to dry, it can still smudge easily if your hands are even slightly damp. This issue showed up only in photos with dark-almost black-areas, but on those few photos the problem was annoying.
A more troublesome issue was differential gloss-with some areas of a photo reflecting light differently, so some sections were duller or shinier than adjacent areas. Our monochrome photo showed a slight off-black tint, which won't be a problem if you don't print in monochrome. Conversely, its photo performance was above average, with some, but not all, photos qualifying as true photo quality. Graphics quality, however, was easily good enough for most business purposes, even though thin lines tended to disappear, and we saw obvious banding in default mode. That makes the text good enough for most purposes but marginal if you need clean, crisp, text that conveys a sense of absolute professionalism. Its text performance was slightly below par: More than half the test fonts were easily readable at 6 points, but less than half were readable at 5 points or below, and two highly stylized fonts needed 12 points. The 964's focus on photo printing was apparent when judging its quality on output for text, graphics, and photos. By comparison, the MP500's times were 1:18 for each 4-by-6 and 3:12 for each 8-by-10.
On our tests, the 964 averaged 2:28 for each 4-by-6 and 5:29 for each 8-by-10. Speed for photos is similarly acceptable but not impressive. Although that makes it faster than most AIOs in its price range, it's significantly slower than the Editors' Choice Canon Pixma MP500, which costs the same but performed the tests 5 minutes faster. Its total time on our business applications suite (timed with QualityLogic's hardware and software, was 20 minutes 19 seconds. The 964's performance is best described as acceptable, but it's certainly not impressive for the price. For better-looking photos, you can replace the black cartridge with a photo cartridge, adding light cyan and light magenta, for printing in six colors. Not so incidentally, the 964 comes with a black and tricolor cartridge for four-color printing, using cyan, yellow, magenta, and black. Simply snap in the two cartridges, load paper, run the automated installation program, and plug in the cable. Setup is easy and standard for an ink jet AIO that uses two ink cartridges and connects with a USB cable. Luckily, the Dell Photo All-in-One Printer 964 ($199 direct) fits both, making it a good choice to serve double duty as a home photo and home-office printer.Īt 9.7 by 19.2 by 14.9 inches and 22 pounds, the 964 is a little on the heavy side for a home AIO but small enough to fit comfortably on a desk or nearby table. It's easy to find a printer that fits one description or the other. If you're looking for a printer to print photos at home, you probably want one with high-quality photo output, the ability to print directly from PictBridge cameras and memory cards, and an LCD screen for previewing photos.
If you have a home office and you need an all-in-one (AIO) printer, you want something that can copy, scan, and fax, as well as include an automatic document feeder (ADF) for multipage documents.
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