Product Reviews

As differences in quality become more and more difficult to determine, inkjet printer manufacturers are having to come up with new ways to differentiate their products and gain an edge on the competition. The latest entrant in the field is Epson's Stylus Photo 895.

The new model is a six-colour, 2880dpi x 720dpi inkjet that uses Epson's micro-piezo technology to produce excellent colour photographic prints. Nothing new there. However, the 895 is also capable of printing photographs without the need of interference from a computer, in much the same way as HP's PhotoSmart printers (see Labs, 6 April 2001, p66). This is made possible by a Type II PC Card slot on the front of the printer into which a card containing images can be inserted and the images it contains printed out. That's made more useful than it initially seems by the inclusion of a PC Card to Compact Flash adaptor with the printer. There are also adaptors available for Smart Media and IBM's Micro Drive.

Working in conjunction with this direct printing hardware is Epson's Print Image Matching technology. The idea behind this is that digital camera manufacturers incorporate Print Image Matching into their cameras and so digital photographs on the camera are 'tagged'. The tags contain information relating to the image which can be read by the printer.

When the file is printed on the Stylus Photo 895, the printer makes adjustments in its settings that correspond to the information contained in the tags. A number of manufacturers, including Minolta, Olympus, Ricoh and Sony, have announced their intention to provide this facility in future cameras. However, until a camera equipped with the technology is produced, there's no way to tell exactly how much of a difference Print Image Matching will make to print quality.

Also new on the Stylus 895 is a monochrome LCD, which is used to enable the user to make various decisions about how images on a Compact Flash/Smart Media card are printed. The display is very well laid out and clearly labelled, making it simple to use after only the briefest of glances at

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the manual. The options available from this control panel include the selection of the images to print, paper size, paper type and the layout of the photos on the page. There's also an optional colour LCD which displays a preview of the image to be printed.

Despite the excellent features for direct printing, we suspect that most people will still want to connect the Stylus Photo 895 to their Mac. Sadly, to do this you'll have to buy a USB cable separately because Epson, in common with other inkjet printer manufacturers, doesn't include one in the box. Installing the driver software and connecting the printer (once you've bought the cable) is as easy as you would expect. However, should you run into problems there's an excellent A3 Setup Guide on hand to help and a decent hard copy manual as well.

Results from colour photographs on the Stylus Photo 895 on glossy paper were as good as you would expect from a manufacturer with Epson's pedigree. And they are comfortably among the best we've seen from an inkjet printer. We were particularly impressed with the results of digital photographs printed directly from a Compact Flash card. However, plain paper results were less impressive, with visible banding on every page we printed. Prints of greyscale photographs tended to have a noticeable bluish cast when compared with the original.

Print speed is reasonable - it took a little over four minutes to print an A4-sized, 300dpi image at the highest quality setting on glossy paper. However, this is about a minute longer than the Canon s800 took to print a similar image with equally impressive results.

Setting the standard

We were impressed with the features offered by Epson's driver software and in particular the ability to scale an image and select its relative position on the paper - no more wasting an entire sheet of A4 glossy paper by printing one 6in x 4in photo in the middle of it.

A claimed lightfastness of up to 20 years - roughly similar to claims made by HP and Canon about their own photo printers - and edge-to-edge printing on standard paper round off an excellent feature set.

Stiff competition in the inkjet market has greatly benefited users and in no printer is this more apparent than the Stylus Photo 895. It may not be as fast as the Canon s800 nor have the Canon printer's removable ink tanks. And it's arguable whether there is a real difference in print quality between the best printers from Canon, Epson and HP. However, the Stylus Photo 895's excellent features, combined with its impressive print quality, for a price of £169.36, puts it out in front of the competition and sets a benchmark that will be tough to beat.