 |
|
 |
|
|
Details at a glance
Printing: 6 Inkjet
Max Paper Size: A4
Resolution: 5760x1440
Dim: 462x474x297
Weight: 5.2kg
We clicked with
Excellent print quality, CD printing, price
Shots in the dark
Slower than some competitors, no duplex unit, concerns over bundled software, ink costs
Links
More Epson information
www.epson.co.uk
|
 |
|
The Epson R220 is priced as an entry level photo printer but its ability far outstrips its price point. Six tanks of ink and “picolitre” drops add up to impressive print quality up to borderless A4 - oh, and it prints CDs as well.
Appearance and features
It looks like a printer. There's a tray at the top for feeding paper in and a tray at the front for it to come out when it's printed. Across the top there's a power button to turn it on and off, a paper feed/delete button and a button to allow you to change the ink cartridges. That's it. If you are used to the Canon Pixmas with their compact form factor, which allows them to be stacked then you're going to think this is a big printer. Otherwise, well, it's about the size of an A4 printer and it looks like an A4 printer. One nice touch is the USB socket on the front as well as the back. The paper trays may limit exactly where you can put the printer on your desk but the USB sockets allow you a little flexibility with cables.
Normal paper handling is pretty much what you would expect too. Drop a stack of A4 paper in the feeder and there is a sliding support to keep it straight and another one behind it to keep it from flopping. As it feeds out onto your desk there's a pull out paper tray. Paper follows a nice simple path and comes out without curling. In all the time I used the R220 I never experienced a paper jam.
The R220 also prints CDs and DVDs (as long as you use printable ones). There is a separate drop down flap on the front of the printer for these. Put the disk in the supplied tray, pull down the flap, slot it in and hit “print” on the Epson CD print software. A little under 3 minutes later you should get a perfectly printed disk. One word of warning here is that the tray feeds all the way through the printer so you'll need to be sure there's nothing behind it on the desk.
Advanced Features
Again, it's very much the usual suspects. The printer features “Print image matching” and “Exif print”. Both of these analyse the camera data when the shot was taken and attempt to give a better quality print. How this works is never really explained anywhere but printing pictures without editing them it seems to work quite well - generally providing more saturation and “punch” to the pictures.
There are also a wide range of clever software features such as poster prints (by printing the image across 4 pages) and watermarking. There is also a cunning “double sided” mode. The printer doesn't have a duplex tray, it prints all the odd pages then you flip them over and feed them again to print the evens. Not particularly sophisticated but as long as you keep your wits about you it works well. However most of these advanced features will not work on a Mac - they are PC only.
Software
The printer is supplied with a comprehensive suite of software. This allows you to do rudimentary picture editing (including red eye), print multiple images on a page and generally correct and enhance your snaps. There is a separate package for CD/DVD printing.
Normally I don't bother with software like this so I just charged ahead and did a “custom” install to install just the CD printing part. This was a mistake. I installed the software before the drivers and missed out a package I thought wasn't relevant and generally got in a tangle. 30 mins later I admitted this and did an “easy” install. This worked perfectly and everything was now up and running. Much of the delay was my own fault but if there's an option to install just the CD printing software I don't expect it to fail because “Easy Print” isn't installed.
Once the install issues were over the software worked OK at correcting images. The only thing I couldn't get it to do was print! The only printers it allowed me to use were two Canon Pixmas that were no longer connected. It couldn't find my laser printer on the network and it certainly wouldn't allow me to print to the properly configured R220 sitting a short USB lead away. It was most odd. To be fair this might be to do with my cack-handed installation - I got the printer to print fine from every other piece of software though.
Quality
This is where I forgive the R220 everything. I dropped in a sheet of my favourite Olmec gloss, set the print quality to “photo paper” and hit print. The first print was a colour test chart and I received lovely print with decent accuracy in the colours and acceptable detail. Looking hard at it there was a small loss of detail but this was looking at the numbers on a clock face which was less than an inch across on the A4 sheet. Using the supplied Epson cartridges, the colours were natural and accurate. Really the print quality was far in excess of what I would expect at this price point.
Text printing was “adequate”. Inkjet printers aren't great at text and the letters were a little fuzzy around the edges - in no way a match for a cheap laser. However, I'd happily use it for letters to the bank manager.
CDs and DVDs produce beautiful results and I know of many people who use an R220 just for this. Full colour edge to edge printing on a disk looks so much better than a handwritten label.
Areas for improvement...
This is going to sound like a strange complaint but the buttons on this printer are just wrong. Tell it to print 2 CDs and it prints the first. Then it asks for the next disk. There is a green light and a red light. The red light is on the “delete” button but this is the one you have to press to load the next disk.
Print speed isn't the greatest. The quoted maximum print speed is 15 pages per minute but a full coverage borderless A4 test chart printed in 3 minutes 15 seconds. That's not particularly fast but it did give great quality.
As always with inkjet printers my major gripe is with the ink cost. The R220 is available all over the web for about £55 - a complete set of inks can cost £50. Splitting the ink into 6 tanks is nice since I can only replace the ones I need to but at £8 a cartridge that can get very expensive.
 |
|
|
|
Once you get over the installation problems and the decidedly unfriendly Mac software you will find a very useful printer that is worth more than it is priced at. A4 printing is quick and jam-free and photo-prints are colourful and accurate. Ink prices are a tad on the expensive side but this is a problem you will find with all inkjets.
|
|
|
|
|
 
|
 |
