Product Reviews

Not to put too fine a point on it, the Stylus Color 1160 is big. Damn big. In fact, it's about a centimetre wider than a fridge, and with its input and output trays fully extended it takes up more space than a monitor. To be fair, it's got every right to be large: this is a fully-fledged A3 printer. And, once you've cleared enough space on your desk to set the beast down, you're rewarded with simple, painless installation and a choice of parallel or USB connections.

Epson's traditional strength is photo printing. At the printer's highest quality setting - 1,440x720dpi - the Color 1160 took just over 12min to print an A4 image onto glossy photo paper, but the results were worth the wait. Even though this printer only uses four colours of ink, it had no problem reproducing skin tone or detail. For overall quality, it can't quite match Epson's dedicated A4 photo printer, the Stylus Photo 750 (reviewed March 1999), but it comes a close second. If you switch to Epson's Photo Inkjet paper, the 1160 also produces decent quality at speed - not a strength of the 750, which takes around 13mins per print for good results. We managed to print our photo in as little as 1min 49s.

The most basic test for a printer is black and white text, and the one to beat is Hewlett Packard's DeskJet 970Cxi. The Color 1160 certainly can't match the DeskJet's speed. In fact, it would have come third in that Lab Test, taking 73s to complete our five-page test document. The 970Cxi

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finished in 35s. Sadly for Epson, the 970Cxi also has superior text quality; the 1160's look disappointingly fuzzy. If you only need quality occasionally, the 1160 rises to the occasion in its highest quality setting. Then, however, the speed drops to 1ppm (page per minute).

When mixing graphics with text, the 1160 regained some kudos. There was a certain amount of banding on solid blocks of colour, but this is only obvious if you look for it, and at the printer's default setting it only took 42 seconds to print out our sample business report. This is only one second slower than the HP 970Cxi, and if anything the 1160 edged its rival for overall quality.

Where the Stylus 1160 has absolutely no match is in its ability to print A3 pages. The 1160 holds up to 100 A3 sheets at any one time, whereas rival 'A3' inkjets have to be manually fed sheets one at a time. Of course, all this would be worth little if the end results were poor, but we were suitably impressed. In black and white, the 1160 manages around 2ppm, while a colour page takes just under a minute. Results were as good as for A4.

Printing at A3 does have one drawback, though - running costs. Each page requires twice as much ink as its A4 counterpart, making the cost around 10p for a colour page. There's also increased annoyance from having to replace ink cartridges: Epson hasn't increased the volume of the cartridges in tandem with the size of the printer. Consequently, the colour cartridge lasts just 150 basic pages.

But the Stylus Color 1160's asking price is of much more immediate concern. Its current street price is £266, compared to £210 for the 970Cxi (which includes a duplex module for two-sided printing), and £133 for the Stylus Color 760. As it stands, you'd better be certain you'll make full use of its A3 ability before spending the extra money. If it's vital, there's no contest for the 1160. If not, take a look at the 760; it may be slower, but its quality is near-identical, and there are much more interesting ways to spend the £133 you'll save.