Editors' note: This is the second in an ongoing CNET series of product wish lists. Look for dream designs for electronics products in the coming weeks.

By Lori Grunin
(6/26/02)

Our fantasy inkjet printer would create stunning photos and perfect text in the blink of an eye, preferably with zero ink costs and complete autonomy. But that printer would also likely defy the laws of physics and economics. We're willing to settle for a more attainable ideal: a printer with the photo quality of an Epson Stylus Photo, the speed of a Canon, the cost efficiency of a laser printer, and the ease of use of a Hewlett-Packard. But there are some less obvious features that would also make inkjet printing a whole lot better. Here's what we came up with. Have ideas of your own? Drop us a line.

1. Shock absorbers An inkjet printer in full gear can shake, rattle, and roll as much as an off-balance washing machine; unfortunately, the printer usually shares your desk. We'd love to see some sort of shock-absorbent layer, feet, or padding, either within the chassis or beneath it, to minimize the printer wiggling and to reduce the ambient noise emitted by the device.
	2. Let there be light We'd also like a clear plastic window on the outside of the printer and a little light on the inside--like an oven--so that we could verify that printing's proceeding properly.
3. Intelligent diagnostics When printing, lines or pixels randomly drop out. Blocked nozzle? Printhead not firing on all cylinders? Usually, your only diagnostic tools--and we use the term loosely--consist of endless head-cleaning cycles and test prints. On top of the inconvenience and frustration, the cost of all that wasted ink adds up quickly. We need a little more self-awareness built into the printheads and the mechanism so that you can at least tell if the problem is physical, mechanical, or electronic. And instead of forcing more precious ink through the nozzles to clean them, what about an actual refillable cleaning solution--Windex, anyone?
	4. More flexible paper handling We prefer the enclosed paper trays found in midrange laser printers; they keep the dust out and the paper flat. We'd take it once step further and put the enclosed tray at the back of the printer, rotated along its landscape edge, so that it can tilt up in a space-saving L-shaped path or lie flat to drive thicker media straight through the printer.

5. Automatic paper-type sensor One of the most ill- or infrequently used selections in the printer driver is the paper-type option. A small sensor in the paper path (like those found in some higher-end Epson and HP printers) would detect media thickness and optical properties--such as brightness, coating composition, and reflective characteristics--and ensure that the driver uses the right setting every time. At the very least, it should detect and alert you when you're about to print on the wrong side of the paper.

	6. Waste not Recyclable print cartridges, please. If manufacturers want to guard their lucrative ink-cartridge businesses by blocking third-party refill solutions, that's one thing. But they should at least take 'em back and do the refilling themselves. Combined with a paper-type sensor to reduce paper waste, this would make printers a lot more eco-friendly.

7. Pages per gallon of ink If a car can tell you how many miles per gallon you're getting at a particular moment, why can't a printer tell you how much it cost to print the last page or how many pages you actually got out of the cartridge you just replaced? Then we could make informed decisions about media, total cost of ownership, and finally settle the debate on the relative costs of single-piece vs. separate ink-tank/printhead assemblies.
	8. Running on empty It's a simple request: When an ink cartridge runs out, stop printing. Epson puts a smart chip into its cartridges that does just that, but it's primarily to block ink refillers from reusing the cartridge. We'd like to be able to choose how much ink equals empty so that we can change the cartridge before ruining a print job--or run on fumes to use up every last drop. As a corollary, the device should also stop printing if the ink is simply pooling on the paper--usually a sign that you're printing on the wrong side--before it has mucked up the paper path.
9. Mix-'n'-match colors As pigment-based inks (such as those used by Epson in its Stylus Photo 2200) start to pervade the mainstream, we'd like to see more interesting formulations, such as metallic or glow-in-the-dark colors. And it's time to start branching out of traditional fixed-color primaries (CMYK) into roll-your-own ink sets. For instance, if the only color in your document is a specific red for your logo, you should be able to use, say, three black ink tanks and one custom red tank for the most efficient printing.
10. Bring back Prt Scr We miss the days when you could send a screen to the printer with a single keystroke. Now you have to capture it and paste the bitmap into an application before you can print it, a big problem if you're trying to print fatal-error dialogs. If the printer driver could intercept the keystroke, automatically rasterize it, and send it down to the printer, we wouldn't have to be so nostalgic for DOS.

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