Product Reviews

Ever since the Stylus Color 600 and 800 printers appeared, Epson's inkjets have had the upper hand over HP's in terms of sheer quality. It seems that no matter how hard HP tries to refine its technology, Epson always manages something slightly better. This time its Stylus Photo 750 has trounced HP's DeskJet 880C.

Not only does the Epson boast a superior resolution (1,440x720dpi) to the HP's, it has also gone one better in the dot size department.

In answer to HP's improved PhotoREt II technology, which HP claims can produce dots as small as eight picolitres, Epson's are down to an incredible six picolitres! But that's not all: the 750, like the Stylus Color 740 before it, can also vary the size of its dots. In theory, this means that when it doesn't need to recreate fine detail and subtle shading (while printing text, for example) the printer can use larger dots to cover the paper more quickly. Last but not least, being from the Stylus Photo range rather than the Stylus Color range, the 750 has two additional dilute inks on board to help print lighter areas smoothly.

These advantages became apparent in our quality tests, where the 750 performed brilliantly with photographic image printing on all paper types. In light areas, the dots are almost

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invisible, while detail in dark areas is unsurpassed. Basically, this is the best photographic printing we've seen from any inkjet, and even a fractional improvement over the incredibly high standard set by the Epson Stylus Color 740 printer we reviewed in our November 98 issue, which is no mean feat.

Printing text on plain paper, the 750 achieves commendably black and smooth characters, on a par with the HP 880C. Though it's not what you'd call laser quality, it's indistinguishable from a normal viewing distance. However, if you optimise the driver for speed, the quality drops significantly, suffering from ink-bleed.

One area where Epson can't match HP, is in elegance and quality of design. The 750 retains the familiar Epson inkjet look, with its angled sheet feeder protruding from the rear and retractable output tray at the front. With everything fully extended, it takes up more room than the HP. And while the 880C's print heads swish silently across the paper, the Epson emits a high pitched whining during printing. If you're easily annoyed by such things, it may pay to look elsewhere. The 750 does at least include a USB port at the rear, matching the 880C in this respect.

And it's not all bad news for HP on the performance front either, as the 750 is slower in all departments. Printing a full-size A4 photograph on glossy paper, for example, took almost three minutes longer at 13 minutes and 55 seconds and, more significantly, the 750 was a complete slow-poke in the text printing department. Even optimised for 'speed', the 750 took nearly 16 minutes to produce the 25 pages of plain text, almost three times as long as the 880C!

If you're not going to be carrying out long print runs, though, you'll forgive all of this. The HP 880C may be slightly cheaper and faster, but the Epson still offers the ultimate in quality.