Tech Reviews -- Dry-Color Printers Could Douse Inkjet Sales

Remember the craze a few years ago for the oxymoronic concept of "dry" beer?

Now it's time for "dry" color printing. But this isn't an oxymoron, and the first dry-color printers could make their competitors - inkjet printers - look all wet.

Alps Electric of Japan has developed a new technology for inexpensive color printing, which it calls "Micro Dry," and has introduced a $499 printer, the MD-2010, and a $699 combination printer-scanner, the MD-4000. The company also licensed its technology to Citizen Watch of Japan, which started shipping a Micro Dry printer last year that wasn't aimed at consumers.

By the end of March, however, Citizen says it will start widely selling its own version of the MD-2010, dubbed the Printiva 700, and the MD-4000, renamed the Printiva 1700.

For more information, call the U.S. office of Alps at (800) 825-2577 or go to http://www.alpsusa.com on the World Wide Web. The U.S. office of Citizen is at (800) 477-4683 or http://www.citizen-america.com on the Web. All the models are available for both Windows and Macintosh systems.

I just finished putting the MD-4000 through its paces, and I'm impressed. Micro Dry has several clear advantages over inkjets.

Several disadvantages, however, will likely keep inkjets in their current place as the printer of choice for most home personal-computer users.

The three companies that dominate inkjet sales - Canon, Epson and Hewlett-Packard - have done a phenomenal job in the past few years of driving down prices and improving print quality. Their midlevel models, which sell for $250 to $300, can produce pages that look almost as good as a magazine, particularly when using special high-quality paper that costs anywhere from 50 cents to $2 a sheet.

But inkjets, which spray nearly microscopic dots of liquid ink onto the page from a small plastic container, aren't perfect. Because the ink is wet, the tiny dots tend to seep through the pores of ordinary paper - making the image blurry. The special papers are much less porous, which is why they produce sharper images.

Inkjet pages are also easy to smear, especially in the first few minutes after they come out of the printer. What's more, the ink will fade over time, especially if near sunlight, making inkjets inappropriate for printing anything you want to keep around for several years or more.

The Micro Dry printers, in contrast, use four ribbons in tiny cassettes - black, yellow, cyan and magenta - to produce colors. The printer heats the ink on the ribbon to deposit a tiny dot, which sticks to the paper like a drop of wax from a candle rather than soaking into the fibers on the surface.

The result: color images on plain paper that equal or even exceed what inkjets accomplish with the pricey special papers. Indeed, Alps says the Micro Dry printers, which produce up to 600-dots per inch in color and 1,200-dots per inch in black and white, work best with a brand of standard paper - Hammermill Laser Print No. 00460 - that sells for slightly under $10 for 500 sheets, or about 2 cents a page.

The ribbons run $7 each, so a set of four will cost $28 - about the same as a color inkjet cartridge, and Alps says the ribbons will produce about as many pages as an inkjet. I haven't tested that claim.

My Micro Dry printer churned out sharp reproductions of color photographs and virtually flawless renderings of text, with individual letters more precise than produced by my office's laser printer.

The pages were dry the moment they came out of the printer, and didn't smudge even when I licked my thumb and ran it across the page - a stunt that instantly smeared an inkjet print on plain paper even after half an hour of drying.

Alps also says Micro Dry prints won't fade, another claim I can't evaluate now.

One other nice touch: Alps is selling metallic ribbons for about $9 each, which give printed images a kind of shiny, science-fiction appearance.

The downsides to Micro Dry are time and money. The MD-2010 and Printiva 700 cost $200 more than inkjets, so most home PC users - who only want to print out a few glossy color pages a year - will be better off buying an inkjet and splurging on a rare occasion with $1-a-sheet special paper.

The Micro Dry printers are even slower than inkjets, which are themselves much slower than laser printers. A typical color page might take two to three minutes to emerge from a Micro Dry machine, and a typical black-and-white page takes 30 seconds. That makes Micro Dry a poor choice for anyone who prints out lots of plain text.

Alps also designed on-screen control panels for the Micro Dry printers that appear more suited to graphics professionals than ordinary home users, with far too many options for tweaking output. The printer-scanner model comes with four separate instruction manuals.

Combining a scanner and printer is a clever idea, saving desk space and requiring only one cable plugged into a PC's parallel port instead of two. But I found the Alps scanner to be finicky, occasionally crashing my PC. And documents to be scanned must be placed inside one of two protective plastic sleeves - a small one for photographs and a large one for full pages. It's a step that could degrade image quality if the plastic surface gets scratched or dirty; what's more, replacing the small holder costs $10 and the large holder $11.

The vast majority of home users, I think, should stick with the tried and true inkjets. But anyone with a particular need for high-quality output on plain paper, or smear-free pages that won't fade, should consider the Micro Dry alternative.