Canon Pixma iP4300

The Pixma iP4300 is fast, its print quality is good, and it has some nice features. Though it does suffer from a few design shortcomings, we recommend it highly.The Pixma iP4300 set records in all of our speed tests, blasting through ten pages of text at a rate of 11.9 pages per minute. Graphics and photos also printed at a fast pace.Its print quality showed the advantages of its five-ink design, which uses cyan, magenta, yellow, black, and pigment-black cartridges. The last of these inks helped produce black and mostly precise text output. Photos looked bright and natural on glossy paper, but on plain paper the same images looked a bit grainy and had some banding. Grayscale photos appeared a little rough, and diagonal or curved lines seemed slightly jagged.The Pixma iP4300 has automatic duplexing (allowing for two-sided printing)--a great bonus for a photo printer at this price. It comes with two 150-sheet input trays, one vertical and one flat-mounted underneath. To designate which tray to use, you press a slim button on the front control panel; next to it, a lighted diagram confirms your choice. The supplied output tray can hold 75 pages. This printer combines useful features and solid performance, but the design seems intended for sharp-eyed people only. Controls are labeled with small, unintuitive icons that do not clearly indicate their functions. Markings for the PictBridge port and the flat-mounted input tray are in almost the same color as the surrounding plastic, which makes them hard to read.Though printed and HTML-based documentation for this printer is generally good, the Easy Setup Instructions poster doesn't always make things easy. It assumes that you know what and where all the parts are (for a detailed explanation, you must consult the HTML-based guide). An illustration of how to adjust the paper size in the tray mounted beneath the printer fails to explain how all the sliders work--and they're tricky.Canon throws in some useful bundled software. Easy-PhotoPrint and PhotoRecord let you edit, organize, and print digital photos. Easy-WebPrint helps you format and print Web content so it doesn't run off the page.The Pixma iP4300 has it all: speed, impressive output quality, and a good price.

NEC MultiSync 20WMGX2

NEC's MultiSync 20WMGX2 follows on the success of its smaller siblings, the 70GX2 and 90GX2. Like its smaller siblings, this 20-inch wide-screen LCD employs a glossy screen that shows rich colors and sharp detail. However, the 20MGX2 also includes entertainment extras such as a TV tuner and remote. Our jury gave the 20WMGX2 high marks on PC World's text test screens. It didn't lead the pack on any one test, but its consistently high performance on each screen combined to give it a fine text score. In graphics tests, the 20WMGX2's performance really took off. It wowed our jurors with rich and accurate colors, especially on our important (and difficult) photo tests. It brought out both the vibrant colors in our fruit tart photo and the natural skin tones in our group portrait. We even saw the freckles on our fairest portrait subject; many monitors render the freckles invisible. Like NEC's other GX2 models, this 20-inch wide-screen has a round stand with a lazy-Susan swivel mechanism. The screen controls, including the intuitive eraserhead-like NaviKey, sit between the bottom of the silver bezel and the large black speaker bar beneath it. The 20WMGX2 sports not one, but two back panels to shelter inputs. One panel covers the DVI and VGA inputs and two of the four USB ports (the other two live on the left side of the bezel). The other panel conceals the S-Video, composite, and component inputs as well as a TV antenna. An NTSC TV tuner allows the 20MGX2 to show over-the-air TV content. The silvery remote feels slightly flimsy, but it works. Its easy-to-find DV mode button makes it easy to flip between the different presets: standard, text, movie, gaming, and photo. When I watched HDTV, standard-def TV, and DVD content on the movie mode, I found its picture generally pleasing, but slightly soft and pale. I found the photo mode easier to watch. All in all, though, this is far better moving-image quality than I usually see from a desktop monitor--TV tuner or no. Its $699 price (as of 5/18/06) would be steep for an ordinary 20-inch desktop monitor. For an excellent desktop monitor that's also a decent TV, though, it's a good deal.