Alps MD-2010 review

The Alps MD-2010 is a colour printer with a difference.

Instead of using liquid ink cartridges, the MD-2010 uses special tape cartridges to produce a completely dry image on plain paper. This means that it avoids the problem of 'bleeding' often associated with inkjet printers. The special Micro Dry ink used is both waterproof and fade resistant.

The MD-2010 has an attractive design with nice curves and rounded edges. Paper is fed from the back and emerges from the bottom front where there is also a pull out tray, so you need to have a bit of extra desk space on your desk when printing. On the top there are three buttons: power on/off, online and reset. There are also a total of 12 LEDs: four of these are for cartridge status and three are for media status. Others indicate power on, online, error, data being received and colour mode.

Pulling down the front panel reveals the cartridge carriers. The MD-2010 uses cyan, magenta, yellow and black cartridges. These can be placed in the carriers in any order and the printer recognises each type by means of a small metal stripe on the side of the cartridge. Having separate colour cartridges means that if you run out of one particular colour, you only have to replace that cartridge. This compares well with printers that use a single multi-colour ink cartridge.

Printing is a four-pass process where each colour is layered on top of the previous one. The printer automatically selects the cartridges one at a time from the carriers and replaces them when it has finished. Naturally, this means printing is rather slow. A single pass for a complete full-colour A4 page can take up to 2.5 minutes, which could mean a total printing time of 10 minutes per page. Obviously the MD-2010 is not at all suitable for large volume printing.

As well as its rather pedestrian pace, the MD-2010 generates slightly more noise than a typical inkjet printer. This is mainly due to the mechanism used to change cartridges while printing.

The MD-2010 repositions the paper at the beginning of each pass and the feed mechanism is accurate enough to avoid any possible overlap. However, the printed image does suffer from very slight banding, which is more noticeable when viewed under certain lighting.

The overall print quality is excellent, with a maximum resolution of 600x600 dpi in full-colour mode. Colour reproduction is very accurate and the printed image is both bright and vibrant. When printing in black only, the MD-2010 can achieve a maximum of 600x1200 dpi resolution.

The MD-2010 outdoes inkjets in that you can also buy metallic ribbon cartridges in gold, silver, metallic red and metallic blue. These colours can be used to produce some very bright and original images that would certainly stand out in a presentation. The printer can handle a variety of different thickness of paper, card and plastic sheets. The paper input tray can be released from its normal upright position to the horizontal position for manual feeding. This allows thicker sheets to feed flat across the printing area. The MD-2010 comes with a sample pack which contains a few different papers and films, including OHP transparency sheets, iron-on transfer sheets and black greetings cards.

Alps supplies an excellent printer driver for the MD-2010. This lets you select the type of document you want to print, such as a photograph or business graphics, and then adjust a wide range of different options. You can adjust the colour depth, resolution, half toning, brightness and contrast of the image being printed. You can even adjust the balance of the individual colours to obtain the effect you want. As the document is being printed, a graphical representation of the printer displays its progress.