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We clicked with:
Ultra quiet inkjet
Very detailed prints
Accurate colour potential
Relatively cheap inks
Very well built
Shots in the dark:
Cartridges too small for A3+
Colour management best left to Photoshop
Slow to print, long to dry
Price Comparison:
Epson Stylus Photo 1400
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Long ago, Epson made the photographer's friend - the 1290 printer. This A3 edge to edge design was so well received, Epson kept it going long past the usual life cycle of a printer product. Will its replacement - the Epson Stylus Photo 1400 - do as well? Whoa yes!
Like the entry-level R285 we tested, this printer uses Claria inks - that's a six colour process, featuring (in left to right order) yellow, black, light cyan, light magenta, magenta and cyan cartridges. Claria inks are cheaper than Epson's Ultrachrome, and - judging from the R285 - gave a fair acquittal of their performance. However, put the same inks in the Epson Stylus Photo 1400 and the performance is pitched up several notches; no magenta skin or cool monochrome prints here. This is pro-grade performance at a real-world price. Yes, the prints still take an age to dry and yes, the you can blitz through ink cartridges at a wild rate (especially if you have a sheaf of A3s to plough through) but everything about this printer bespeaks quality far beyond the price tag.
This is an exceptionally well-made printer, especially when you factor in the price tag. It should be, it's a big and relatively heavy A3+ printer. The 1280 and 1290 legacy is safe in the hands of the Epson Stylus Photo 1400. It also uses the new 1.5picolitre droplet size jets, and has five sizes of droplet from the head. This is suggested to deliver better gradations of solid colours, like skies.
Epson provides the usual raft of software with the printer, although it's best to hand over colour adjustment to Photoshop instead of Epson's own utility. In fairness, unless you have some serious printing package installed, the same applies to all printers - the Epson Stylus Photo 1400 is no different from most printers here. CD cover printing is another matter and if you use the supplied utility, you can make very acceptable CD prints at speed. Whatever software you use, print times are not quick - print up an A4 at the best 'Photo RPM' setting will take a dozen minutes or more. Fortunately, unlike its little Claria-breathing R285 brother, the 1400 is whisper quite, relatively speaking.
It sounds like a contradiction, but the Epson Stylus Photo 1400's output is vividly natural. Colours are extremely accurate across the board, with none of the orangey casts or muted greens of many ink-jets. Perhaps too much green... using the standard Epson printing bundle, you could never shake a mild greeny cast to images (especially in monochrome), but this was clearly software not hardware; printing using Photoshop's colour management left the image detailed and as colour accurate as you could find today. Those fancy 1.5 picolitre jets seem to live up to expectations, with remarkably fine printing, even by Epson standards. Surprisingly, the monochrome prints even came close to those generated by printers that double dip in the black, like the R2400.
There is only one downside to this printer - the print cartridges. They are relatively small for A4 printing; for edge-to-edge A3, they are tiny. The cartridges may be cheaper than most, but you could easily spank through a set in a busy evening and that gets expensive and frustrating. That's it though... every other aspect of the Epson Stylus Photo 1400 is completely top notch. Although it's ultimately not as sublime a performer as the R2400, you would have to compare prints side by side to see limitations, and we'd bet good money that many people would choose the cheaper printer's output... it's that good.
