I wanted to like the MD-1000 PhotoRealistic Printer, really I did. It boasts some impressive features:

• Can print high-quality 600x600 dpi color images on regular laser paper
• Prints photo-quality 1200x600 color images on photo-grade paper using a special finishing cartridge for a glossy photo-like finish
• Rich color overhead transparencies
• Can print in four colors of metallic ink (gold, silver, metallic magenta, metallic cyan)
• Produces iron-on transfers that are supposed to last longer than ones made with an ink jet printer
• Can print with a white ink cartridge
• Uses separate cartridges for each color so that you can replace only the colors that are depleted.
• Uses a patented "micro-dry" process that fuses the color-fast, water-free ink in a way that Alps claims is superior to ink jet printing

The printer was very easy to set up. My first hint of trouble came when I was taking the four print ribbons out of their box. One ribbon was already split, almost in half. I advanced it and hoped for the best. I loaded up paper and tried to print my first image. It printed the first two colors fine but not the third. It jammed. I tried again. This time it started making weird noises and the print head stopped tracking back and forth. I called Alps, explained the problem and they said that it sounded like I have a bad unit and should send it back. I decide to see if I could fix it myself (I was really anxious to try it out). When I opened the front of the unit to see what was going on, I notice that one of the cartridges (not the one with the split ribbon) was also broken. While I was showing it to my son, he dropped it and it shattered into a million pieces. Man, these little suckers are fragile! Luckily, Alps had provided us with a bunch of extras. But just imagine how pissed you'd be if you'd paid real money for this thing and already had one broken and one damaged cartridge and had to send the machine back and wait for a replacement. I tried monkeying around inside the printer to no avail. It was foreign territory in there.

The MD-1000 uses four separate color cartridges that live in little bays on the front pull-down access door. The carts have barcodes on them so they can be arranged in any order and the computer inside can read the barcode and know which cartridge is which. To print something, the machine feeds the paper in, the print head slides along a track, grabs the right cart, prints one of the colors, replaces the cart, and grabs another one. As each color is printed, the page is sucked back into the machine as the new color is laid down. This constant cartridge detection and swapping technology is very cool, but it makes the machine very temperamental, slow, and rather loud. Even using the laser paper that came with it, paper jams were far too common (even though there was often no visible jam).

We had to wait over a week and a half for the new printer to arrive (after several calls and emails). When it finally did, we were quickly back in business. When I was installing the cartridges though, I noticed that yet another one was broken. OK this is now getting ridiculous.

The MD-1000 mostly performed well. We printed digital color photographs, cartoons, B&W photos, B&W text and art, and a T-shirt transfer. The output is nice. The colors are vibrant, crisp, and smudge-proof. Unfortunately, they are not as true as they are rich. My son made a really cool T-shirt of a three-fingered alien hand giving the peace sign under the banner "We Come In Peace." In PhotoShop, the hand was in a light slime green. The printout was a much darker, almost forest, green. On a photo, a mid-tone purple printed out as dark purple. We printed a page of text in an extremely small, fine script font and had impressive results. It's billed as offering extraordinary results on ordinary paper. Actually, it uses laser paper, not regular bond (which is what I would define as "ordinary" paper). We tried using a decent-grade 20# copy bond and it frequently jammed. It works much better with laser paper, but that adds to the expense of operation.

The real corker was that Alps, while they were nice enough to send us all kinds of extra ink cartridges and paper samples, didn't bother to send any of their PhotoRealistic paper or the finishing cartridge that's used to create the photo-quality images that the printer is supposedly designed for. Without the photo paper and finishing cartridge, you can't print out color in 600x1200 dpi. Hello? It's called the MD-1000 PhotoRealistic Printer. Whose idea was it to send it to us without the supplies necessary to create such photos? I suppose we could have waited another week to get these items, but at this point, I'm frustrated with Alps and frustrated with the machine. It may do what it's designed to do, but at this point, all I see is a reasonably-priced color printer that creates decent color output, but is fragile, finicky, slow, noisy, and certainly not the kind of workhorse you'd want for day-to-day printing.

I'm still interested to see what the photo-grade printing looks like and we haven't had the chance to try the metallic inks. If Alps sends me the supplies and I'm impressed with the results, I'll amend this review and juice up its battery rating. I was hoping to find a specialty printer to print cassette J-cards, color postcards, T-shirts, and other high-end output that didn't cost an arm and a leg. At this point, that machine does not appear to be the MD-1000.

- Gareth Branwyn [3/16/98]