Best printers for holiday greeting cards

The HP Envy 100 e-All-in-One four-color inkjet multifunction printer sports a cutting edge design that fits nicely in a home office, loft space, or any environment where compact good looks matter. Its 3.45-inch color touchscreen LCD and touch-sensitive controls gleam from the front panel. But what looks nice on the outside is matched by this device's printing skills. With a color resolution that can hit 4800-by-1200 dpi, you can expect your holiday greeting cards—printed on card stock or on glossy photo paper—to look stunning. You can also do borderless printing on paper sizes ranging from a small 3.5-inch snapshot to a full 8.5 x 11-inch family portrait. Connect via USB or Wi-Fi, or print from Memory Stick Duo or Secure Digital/MultimediaCards.

The Kodak ESP 9250 All-in-One inkjet printer gives you sharp, crisp photos on glossy photo paper, but it's equally adept at printing color photos and cheery holiday greetings on Avery card stock. The printer's five-ink premium pigment cartridge pairs with its black cartridge to create lovely prints up to 9600 dpi. While colors tend to come across extremely saturated on the cards, that was a good effect. Our sepia card looked especially nice, too. The printer can handle borderless photos from 4-by-6 inches to 8.25-by-11.17 inches. You can connect the printer to the computer via USB or print over Wi-Fi, but you can also print directly from a variety of memory cards, while navigating through your job via the unit's 2.4-inch color LCD. The ESP 9250's image quality is better than its speed, so it works well for low-volume home or office printing.

The Epson Stylus NX625 is part of the company's line of reasonably priced, four-color inkjet, all-in-one printers. This model includes some high-end features at a low price. The NX625 prints at 15 pages per minute for black-and-white documents and 7.2 pages per minute for color. It gives you borderless prints on up to 8.5-by11-inch stock. Its two-picoliter MicroPiezo inks, which can achieve up to 5760-by-1440 dpi, dry in a jiffy. The unit sports a new 2.5-inch color LCD display and supports memory card printing, in-printer photo retouching, red-eye removal, and photo restoration. The printer connects via USB, Ethernet, and Wi-Fi. The NX625 printed silky smooth images on card stock both in color and sepia, and the cards had a rich, warm tone that mixes well with holiday cheer. Don't hesitate to print snappy photo greeting cards with it, too.

The Dell V313w wireless inkjet all-in-one printer ($100) produced top-notch photos on both glossy photo paper and card stock, as well as very saturated, though soft-looking sepia tones. Print resolution can achieve 4800-by-1200 dpi and you can print borderless photos on up to 8.5-by-11 inch stock. This printer supports a variety of memory cards and also connects to your computer via Ethernet, USB, or wirelessly. View multiple photos on your memory cards and USB memory devices, then select, edit, and print them without your computer. It's OK if you're short on time: among its other attributes, this printer is pretty speedy.

The Lexmark Genesis ($400) is an unusual printer. From its vertical design to its 4.3-inch capacitive touchscreen LCD and context-sensitive touch controls that light up as needed, there's nothing traditional about the Genesis. But it does handle all the functions you'd expect from an all-in-one color inkjet. The Genesis features Lexmark’s four-color Vizix print technology, with separate ink cartridges for each color and output up to 4800-by-1200 dpi. You can print on pages up to legal size. The cards we printed with it looked crisp and literally popped on the page with pleasing color saturation and sharpness both in color and sepia. On the side of the unit, there's a single media-card slot for a wide variety of memory cards, as well as a USB/PictBridge port. You can also connect wirelessly. (This is a new item available for pre-order today. Units should be available by mid-December, according to the Best Buy Website.)