Even the most stunning digital photos, no matter how fabulous they look on screen, can lose something in the translation to paper prints. Often, the time, money and effort you invest in the photos is 'rewarded' with lacklustre prints, hardly worth keeping for a treasured memory. But it doesn't have to be that way. By following a few simple steps and making the most of your printer, even if its finer points are sometimes buried away deep inside the printer driver and preferences screens, you can get great results for plain paper document printing and glossy photos alike. The first thing we need is the right tools for the job.

Which printer?
In the car market, you wouldn't expect a compact hatchback to do the same job as a full-on 4x4, and the same applies to inkjet printers. In a nutshell, four-ink printers with a conventional CMYK lineup usually offer fast document printing, while ‘photo printers' that feature six or more colours of inks enable a wider colour space, for reproducing the greater colour range of digital photos. The trouble is that most of us want to print top-quality photos and general-purpose documents without having the added expense of buying and running two separate printers.

One solution to this problem is to work out which type of printing you do most of, and choose a printer that excels in that area. That means you'll typically have to put up with slow document printing, complete with greyish text, from a photo printer, or relatively poor colour accuracy for photos from a document printer, but there are some notable exceptions to the rule. For example, most HP and Lexmark printers enable you to swap out the mono cartridge for a photo cartridge – either is used in conjunction with a normal tri-colour cartridge – thus transforming the printer from a four-ink document printer to a six-ink photo printer by way of a simple cartridge change. An even less fussy approach is adopted by Canon's iP4200 and iP5200 class of printers, which use a unique five-ink system featuring both dye-based and pigment-based black inks that are used full time, together with cyan, magenta and yellow inks. The results are astonishingly good and speedy for both general-purpose printing and glossy photo prints.

If you're not interested in photo printing at all, or you're content to order your photo prints from an online printing service such as www.photobox.co.uk or www.snapfish.co.uk, one of Epson's DURABrite printers is well worth considering.

The Epson Stylus D68 is a good example of the range, using unique resin-based inks which are practically dry even as they hit the paper. The big advantage for document printing is that, unlike prints from almost any other inkjet printer, pages are particularly resistant to smudges and runs caused by subsequent contact with liquids, even when printed on plain or recycled paper. However, the downside of this type of printer is that photo printing lacks some of the gloss of other inkjet printers.

The consumables catch
Considering the high print resolution and speedy efficiency offered by the latest inkjet printers, it's amazing just how cheap they are to buy. The catch is the cost of consumables; relatively high ink cartridge costs signpost where the printer manufacturers are making their money. The consumers' response is to look elsewhere and to buy cheaper, third party ink cartridges, with costs that often work out to as little as 20 per cent of the genuine article. But is there a catch?

We recently bought a set of ‘inkrite' cartridges for a Canon i865 printer from www.mymemory.co.uk. Whereas genuine Canon cartridges cost nearly £10 each on the high street, the inkrite equivalents were just £1.50 per cartridge, therefore offering big savings. However, immediately after installation, our new yellow cartridge failed to work at all and we experienced frequent nozzle blockages from other colours. We had never had this problem with our test printer when using genuine Canon inks.

Printer manufacturers always say you should only use genuine cartridges but, in practice, you can be lucky and get perfectly acceptable results from third party cartridges, at least for general-purpose printing. However, for photo printing, we would always recommend that you use the genuine ink and paper supplies that come from the printer manufacturer.

The chemical reaction between ink and paper can be surprisingly complex, demanding that inks mix together correctly in order to allow the required subtlety and accuracy throughout a wide range of colours, while not running into each other to blur or smudge the edges between adjacent blocks of different colours or in high-contrast scenes.

The amount of ink used is also critical for different types of paper, so it pays not only to stick to genuine consumables but also to pay close attention to driver settings for whichever paper stock you're using.

Clean and aligned
Diving into printer settings, the first thing to check is that your print heads are aligned accurately. With most HP and Lexmark printer models, you get a new print head with each and every cartridge you buy, so it's best to carry out the auto-alignment routine whenever you fit a new cartridge. This is often suggested by the printer driver when it senses that a new cartridge has been fitted. With Canon and Epson printers, where the print head is normally fixed and ink cartridges are just tanks of ink, it's still essential to carry out a head alignment routine when you first install the printer. To maintain accuracy, it's best to carry out a manual alignment procedure once every couple of months thereafter.

Normally accessed from the Maintenance section of the printer driver, print head alignment usually requires a sheet or two of plain paper, a small amount of ink and a couple of minutes. The payback is optimally aligned prints that will be sharper, with cleaner font edges and better fine detail in photos, so it's worth doing.

On an ongoing basis, the most common ailment of inkjet printers is the appearance of faint lines across the page, which cut through text or produce faint lines – often called ‘banding' – on photo prints. The effect is almost always due to blockages of nozzles in the print heads. In our experience, Epson printers with the company's unique use of piezoelectric print heads have always been especially prone to the problem, while Canon printers suffer least frequently from blocked nozzles. HP printers are also reasonably immune to the problem, unless you store mono or photo cartridges for a long time outside of the printer while you're switching between four-ink and six-ink printing. This tends to hold true even if you religiously stick to storing unused cartridges in the special containers supplied.

With any inkjet printer, it's important to power down the printer by using its on/off button, rather than flicking off a wall socket, so that the printer has time to park the print heads properly. This stops them drying out while the printer is switched off, giving rise to blockages that can be difficult to remove.

The nozzle cleaning process generally relies on firing ink through all print head nozzles to clear any blockages. Often, you can run this maintenance utility in normal or ‘deep clean' mode, the latter for clearing more stubborn blockages. Bear in mind that if you need to run a head cleaning utility several times to clear a blockage, you're wasting a large amount of ink, and that ink can end up splashing on to the paper transport system and causing smearing and blotches on subsequent prints. Unless you're in a hurry, if a couple of cleaning cycles fails to do the trick, it's best to leave the printer for a few hours and then try again.

Colour control
Colour calibration is a tricky business and, while it's not normally crucial for general-purpose documents, it's highly desirable in photo printing. If you're happy with your monitor calibration, you want the same results from your printer. In most cases, the automatic print settings should be fairly accurate, especially if you're using genuine paper and ink supplies. However, there are usually manual overrides in the printer driver, which let you change the colour balance by altering the flow rate of each ink colour on a sliding scale. You can also often adjust the overall intensity of the print.

There's always a fair degree of trial and error in colour correction but, for a more scientific approach, you can resort to setting up custom colour profiles which you can save and use for photo printing. For ultimate accuracy, it's worth investing in a printer-profiling tool such as Pantone ColorVision Profiler Plus or Monaco EZColor, which start at around £75 and are available from companies such as www.colourtools.co.uk.

Going a step further, but without resorting to extra software that you have to buy, most printer drivers offer various printing effects, in addition to standard settings for defining which type of paper you're using and so on. For example, Canon's printer drivers usually have an Effects section, which you can use to apply monochrome print effects or to create a more vivid look with highly saturated colours, or to simulate the look of a more artistic illustration, direct from a standard photo. For more everyday usage, the menu also offers image optimisation, which is especially good for smoothing out the edges of low-resolution photographs, for example when outputting a one or two megapixel photo as a full A4 print. In our lab tests, many inkjet printers have proved much better at doing this than printers used by some of the more professional, online print services.

You can also save a lot of time if you often use the same print options, for example in terms of the size and type of paper, borderless printing, image optimisation settings and so on, by saving your requirements as individual printer profiles. You can save any number of print profiles and then load the relevant one for any common print job through the printer preferences at the time of printing. It's a great way of ensuring consistency of results, as well as producing top-quality prints.