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We clicked with:
The price!
Good colour prints, especially for landscapes
Claria inks mean slightly cheaper running costs than equivalents
Useful basic software bundle
Shots in the dark:
Monochrome printing not that hot
Fast print claims 'enthusiastic'
Long drying time
Price Comparison:
Epson R285 Printer
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Multifunction devices that bring a scanner, copier and sometimes a fax to the basic unit have challenged the budget photo printer market. There's still need for good, solid A4 photo printing though, and Epson's Stylus Photo R285 is designed to meet that need head on.
Features
It runs on Epson's new Claria six-ink cartridge system, which is cheaper than traditional multicolour ink cartridge systems from the company, at £6.99 per cartridge and less still for a pack. It still eats ink at a fair lick, and those with a desire to print through dozens of A4 prints might want to look at a continuous ink system, such as the £50 kit from www.inkexpress.co.uk
The printer delivers what is fairly typical of the budget ink-jet breed today; USB 2 connection, Edge-to-edge printing, an option to print onto white-labelled CD blanks and a 1,440dpi print resolution. It doesn't have the brace of front-mounted card readers though, so it isn't designed as a PictBridge standalone device. Epson's Stylus Photo R285 will happily print on paper up to 255gsm, which makes it fine for handling Epson's own photo papers up to and including Premium Gloss, but fine art and rag papers will be just too thick for the printer. Using Epson paper and ink is suggested to give the print a 98year life expectancy, under glass at least.
Performance
Epson has made some big claims about print speed for the Epson Stylus Photo R285, but these claims are not really appropriate for its home photo printing, although the 12 second 10x15cm photo print seems a bit enthusiastic, even in draft mode. The selection of black, yellow, cyan, light cyan, magenta and light magenta inks gives good rich and vibrant colour prints in best quality mode, but - like most budget printers - this is not so hot for black and white printing. Here, we found it delivered a light and cool tone print with a hint too much cyan and little of the richness in deep shadows that mark out a printer as something special in monochrome. That's not the point of the R285 though - those vivid, colourful and finely detailed A4s are its raison d'etre.
The Epson Stylus Photo R285 seems particularly good at reproducing the range of tones in skies (those two cyan cartridges help, we reckon) and landscape enthusiasts will love the results it produces for that alone. We're not so convinced by the performance when it comes to reproducing flesh tones, which can stress the magenta in Caucasian skin - not enough to make everyone look like they have high blood pressure, but just enough to shift faces from 'ruddy' to 'windswept'.
Conclusion
Perhaps it's the lot of budget printers that we become exceptionally hard on them. We want the quality of something like the Stylus Photo R2400 from the Epson Stylus Photo R285, forgetting that a £70 printer is not a £550 printer in the process. Viewed in the light of that £70 price tag, this printer offers a lot; the inks are not 'that' expensive by comparison (although they take a long time to dry) and the colour print image is very good, especially for landscape photographers. An all-in-one will struggle to deliver results as good for photography, and that's the bottom line, isn't it?
