Can Amazon KDP and IngramSpark beat my ancient laser printers?
(Discussion of this post on Reddit’s r/selfpublish)
How does the print quality of Amazon KDP and IngramSpark compare with the decades-old printers I have sitting on my desk? Not as well as you might expect!
Before I became a self-published author, I had no idea what kind of quality to expect from the printed books that my readers would one day hold in their hands. People with industry experience generally told me something like, “The big print-on-demand companies print books using huge, industrial printers that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Obviously, the quality is going to be much better than your janky home printer.”
It turns out that’s not true!
I’ll show you the evidence in a moment, but first let me introduce the printers we’ll look at.
Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) and Lightning Source’s IngramSpark are two of the biggest printers of self-published books in the world. A walk-through of an Amazon facility on YouTube shows that they do indeed use huge, industrial printers. If you scrutinize the video, you can see what appears to be a Canon/Océ ColorStream 6000 at the beginning:
The ColorStream 6000 is a huge inkjet printer. Those two print towers are taller than a human! As near as I can tell, they cost from $700,000 to $1.5 million, depending on the options. But for that price, you can print up to 1400 pages per minute! That’s almost 50 times as fast as a home laser printer.
Later on in the same video, they show an industrial-size laser printer, which seems to be something like a Canon varioPRINT 6000 Series TITAN:
The TITANs are a comparative steal at “only” $25,000. They print about twice as fast as a home printer, because they can print both sides of the paper at once. And they’re rated to produce up to 10 million pages a month, which implies you can run the thing full speed, 24x7, for weeks on end. This would probably melt a home printer!
I can’t find similarly detailed information about IngramSpark’s printers, but their documentation says they use inkjet printers, so I think we can assume they use similar industrial models to what Amazon uses.
To compare against these monsters, I have…two old printers lying around my house.
The first is a Dell Laser Printer 1710 from 2005:
Old Reliable here cost me about $300 back in the day. In 2006, PC Magazine said “Output quality for the 1710 is nothing to write home about,” but it’s served me well for many years. At 19 years old, it’s old enough to vote! It prints 27 pages per minute, so the paper goes through it at about the same rate as the TITAN, though it can only print one side at a time.
My second printer is a Brother MFC-9840CDW from 2008:
It’s an 80-pound back-buster that I seem to remember cost me about $600 when I bought it new. This is a color laser printer intended for home-office use, and it’s 16 years of age, about what you might want for a fine bottle of whisky. Again, it was not the best home printer available at the time, it was just the best one I could afford. It’s a little slower, at 21 pages per minute, but produces higher quality output than the Dell.
To compare the print quality, I scanned the first paragraph of my book at 2400 dpi. Let’s take a look at the whole page width.
At this level, all four look pretty similar in print quality. The initial capital “A” on the left looks different, and we’ll explain that in a minute. But the normal-sized letters, set in 12-point Garamond Pro, appear quite comparable. The background of the first two scans is slightly darker than the second two, but this is only because fiction books are printed on cream-colored paper, not white printer paper.
But when you hold these pages in your hand at book-reading distance, they don’t look much alike. To see why not, let’s zoom in closer.
Looking at all four first words, including a little slice of the initial capital “A”, you can tell that IngramSpark is using an inkjet printer, where Amazon is using a laser printer. The dithered texture of the capital “A” is characteristic of inkjet printers. The last three show halftoning on the capital “A”, which is how laser printers typically print grayscale. Amazon KDP and my old Dell 1710 seem to have the same number of lines per inch in the halftone, though Amazon’s halftone dots look more uniform. The Brother 9840 has more lines per inch in the halftone, and the halftone dots are rounder. This makes sense when you look at the dots per inch (DPI) of resolution that those three printers can achieve. The TITAN is 600x1200 DPI, the Dell is 1200x1200 DPI, and the Brother is 2400x600 DPI.
And remember, the Dell and the Brother are 19 and 16 years old, respectively. They’re not cutting-edge technology! But home printer resolution doesn’t seem to have increased in quite a while. If you look at modern home laser printers, they have the same DPI that they did 15 or 20 years ago. If you want higher resolution, you can buy something like a Xerox VersaLink C7000, which gets you to 1200x2400 DPI. But a printer like that is about twice as expensive as my old Brother was.
Finally, let’s zoom in to the level of a single word:
I stacked them tightly, so you could see that the quality increases as you go down. The best one is a 16-year-old home printer!
Let’s look at them one at a time. First, the Brother, which I think subjectively looks best:
The letter edges are pretty smooth, though not perfectly so, with little lumps or knobs every so often. There’s a bit of a halo around the edges, but not much, and it’s the same thickness in the horizontal and vertical directions.
Now the Dell, which I’d say is second-best:
There are a few one-pixel voids in the letters, which probably just means that my printer drum needs cleaning :) But the edges and halos look about as good as the Brother.
Third-best is Amazon KDP:
It’s crisp, and their drum is clean, so there are no little voids. But look at those stair-step edges on the letter “w”. That probably means that Amazon is running at 600x600 DPI instead of 1200x1200, presumably to speed up printing. So KDP could potentially look better, but that might take a bite out of Amazon’s profit margins :) At arm’s length under a reading light, it looks plenty good.
And finally the worst one, IngramSpark:
The outlines of the letters are clearly quite rough and irregular. And interestingly, the irregularity is mostly in the vertical direction. This is probably because of the extremely high paper speeds in those continuous-feed inkjet printers. You can’t see all these details when reading a book printed this way, but the naked eye can certainly tell that the letters have fuzzy outlines. It’s not egregious, but it’s noticeable.
So there it is. In summary:
Amazon KDP print quality is slightly worse than an old home laser printer
IngramSpark print quality is noticeably worse than an old home laser printer
Also, there may be more complexity to this story that I haven’t puzzled out yet. I’ve seen variations in print quality between books printed by different authors at the same Amazon facility, so there could be some dependency on which specific printer a given book is assigned to, or how the author prepares their PDF file. But I’ll leave that for a later post!
P.S.: In response to a Reddit comment, I went back and looked at the differences in the paper used across these four tests, to see if that could explain some of what I saw above. It doesn’t seem to, though. The papers are all pretty similar :)
Here are the raw numbers:
IngramSpark: 74 GSM cream paper (469 PPI)
Amazon KDP: 74-90 GSM cream paper (410 PPI)
Dell 1710: 75 GSM white paper (526 PPI)
Brother 9840: 75 GSM white paper (526 PPI)
A quick note on the terminology. “GSM” means “grams per square meter”, which measures the weight of the paper per unit area. “PPI” means “pages per inch”, which measures page thickness. The GSM numbers are from the paper specs; the PPI, I measured with digital calipers, using a stack of 50 sheets (which counts as 100 pages, by convention).
Amazon KDP has the heaviest, thickest paper, but only about 15% more so than the average. IngramSpark is middle of the pack, and the laser printer paper is the thinnest (but again, only about 9% thinner than the average of the four).
The biggest visible difference is that I used white paper in the laser printers instead of the cream-colored paper that fiction books are printed on. The surface textures of all four papers looked similar, and all four were uncoated.
The GSM are all the same, except for Amazon KDP, which gives a range. For my book, they seem to have used something around 80 GSM.
The average PPI is 482, and they're all within 15% of the average. I'm not surprised to see slightly different PPI for the same GSM, since PPI would depend on the paper's density as well as the weight per unit area.