Product Reviews

Printers seem to be advancing just as fast as processors and graphics cards, and manufacturers are bringing out new models all the time. The Stylus Color 900 is Epson's latest.

The 900's price tag will stretch the home user's budget, so it had better be good! This is particularly true, given stiff competition from products that cost significantly less, such as Epson's own Stylus Photo 750, whose stunning photo output has earned it a place in our Top 50 Best Buys.

Compared to most inkjet printers, the Stylus Color 900 is a hefty beast, weighing in at 8.4kg and taking up a significant amount of desk space. It's similar in external design to the rest of the Stylus range, though. Paper is held at the rear in an upright snap-on input tray, which holds a maximum of around 100 sheets. This feeds to a telescopic output tray that folds down from the front. In action, however, paper handling isn't as slick as that of Epson's arch-rival, Hewlett Packard. HP's printers have a better design, where the paper is held in a horizontal input tray at the front, keeping it flat and protected from dust.

A peek around the back reveals a USB connector, as well as the standard parallel port socket. Remember, though, USB will only work if you have a suitable socket on your PC, and are running Windows 98.

Epson's printers are unique, in that they use piezo-electric print heads. Piezo-electric substances flex when an electric current is applied to them, and this effect is used to force ink out of the nozzles of the head (other inkjets use

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a thermal technique). Epson says this is why its printers produce the smallest ink droplets of any printer.

The Stylus Color 900 is a four-colour machine. There's standard black, plus cyan, magenta and yellow, which are mixed together in a process called dithering to approximate other colours. The black ink is held in one cartridge, with the cyan, magenta and yellow in another. This means that if the colour runs out you don't have to buy more black as well. But, rather irritatingly, you can't continue to use one cartridge unless you replace the depleted one - a bit daft, really. Installing cartridges is simple enough - just drop them in and snap the locking lever in place.

A perennial problem with Epson printers is that they're not too elegant in operation. Switch on the 900, and you're greeted with a set of bizarre mechanical noises which can take up to two minutes. When it was finally ready, we were mightily impressed with its speed. This really is a very fast inkjet: using the plain copier paper in standard print mode at 360dpi (dots per inch), the unit ran through an everyday 5-page black and white text document in just over forty seconds - that's less than ten seconds per page! That said, print quality in this setting wasn't great, with characters coming out a little ragged. Increasing the resolution to 720dpi improved the situation no end, and text became very crisp indeed.

It's on coated paper that the print quality of the 900 really shines: at the maximum quality setting, the look of both text and graphics is outstanding, with very vibrant colours and a minimum of aberrations, such as banding, that plague many a lesser inkjet. We had high hopes of its abilities when printing photos on glossy paper too, and we weren't disappointed: the tiny ink droplets were practically invisible, making for smooth colour gradation and loads of detail.

We're obsessed with value at Computer Buyer, so while the Stylus Color 900 is a great printer, it's a little too expensive to recommend unequivocally. The Stylus Photo 750 is just as good, quality-wise, but if you need the extra speed, the 900 has it in spades.