Labs

At first glance, Epson's Stylus Photo R360 looks more like a multi-function device than a normal inkjet, with a bulky chassis, a 3.5 inch colour touchscreen, and lots of controls, buttons and options. It's designed to function just as well as a standalone photo printer as it does when connected to your PC, and the touchscreen makes it easy to take advantage. Not only can you view and print photos from your camera or memory card, you can also adjust their brightness, contrast and saturation, or apply sepia and black-and-white effects, although these options are limited to a few presets.

The memory card reader concealed

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below the screen can handle a variety of popular digital camera storage media, and a USB port on the front allows you to print files at full resolution directly from a USB flash drive or a camera that supports PictBridge.

Photo prints were outstanding, with vivid, accurate colours and perfect detail. They took two minutes and 11 seconds each, which is quite slow, but the results were worth the wait. Unfortunately, document printing was less impressive. Draft text was readable but oddly coloured, with pale brownish grey characters. Normal quality mono letter prints looked a bit better, but some lines of text were wobbly and distorted, and print speeds were painfully slow. Mixed colour documents printed relatively quickly, but dark tones looked greyish and washed out.

The R360 has the highest print costs here, and you could certainly get photos printed cheaper by an online service such as www.foto.com. With a combined page cost of 9.1p, you wouldn't want to be using it for reams of documents, especially given the poor quality. But for photos, as long as you don't mind paying a little more per print, it's by far the best machine in the group.