Product Reviews

Inkjet printers have reached such an impressive level of output quality that it's often difficult to tell the difference between a £100 model and one for £300. So how do manufacturers persuade potential customers to buy their products instead of a competitor's? Most believe the answer lies in edging the quality envelope a little further forward while adding what they hope will be killer new features.

This certainly seems to be the philosophy behind Epson's new Stylus Photo 950, and the company has done a great job in implementing it. Headline new features include a smaller, two-picolitre dot and a higher nozzle count on the head. Smaller dots means improved detail, and more nozzles means more dots can be laid down more quickly, thereby improving printing speed.

However, it's the more tangible new features that really catch the eye. A paper roll holder allows paper to be fed to the printer from a roll, rather than individual sheets, enabling the printer to output banners and panoramic photographs. Paper can be cut from the roll automatically once printing has finished. Also included are a Catcher for the roll paper and dedicated input trays for thick media and printable CDs.

Cable shy

Setting up the printer is straightforward and is aided by the single A3 sheet setup guide. However, we have to lament the lack of a USB cable: you'll have to supply your own. Is it really too much to ask when paying more than £300 for a printer to be able to take it out of the box and plug it into your Mac without forking out for a cable?

There are seven separate ink tanks to install (two blacks, cyan, light cyan, magenta, light magenta and yellow). Although this may seem daunting, it's no more complicated than installing the software, and takes less time. The idea behind separate ink tanks is that they make the printer more economical to use, as you don't need to replace a whole cartridge when you run out of one colour. However, at around £9 a tank, the economics are questionable unless you regularly use more of one colour than the rest.

Our one complaint about using the 950 is the online manual supplied on CD. Electronic documentation is never an adequate substitute for hard copy, but it's made even worse by the strange translation into English. More confusing than the awkward sentences is the apparent mixing up of Windows and Mac screenshots in the Mac-specific

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Once you've worked out what the manual is telling you, using the 950 is a pleasure. The drivers present plenty of opportunity for tweaking output, however the excellent results obtained for the presets mean little adjustment is necessary.

Quality control

So good is inkjet quality across the board these days that it's easy to be dismissive of a new device. But the 950 is up there with Canon's S900 in terms of the quality of its output and its speed and almost silent operation.

Its speed is particularly impressive. In our tests, a 123mm x 156mm, full-colour photograph took just one minute 18 seconds to print at the highest-quality setting. Dots are practically invisible, detail is reproduced brilliantly, and our only concern is a very slight over-saturation. However, this problem is easily corrected in the printer drivers.

The edge-to-edge printing facility works very well and we were particularly impressed by the CD printing function. By using the supplied holder along with inkjet printable CD-R discs, the 950 can print directly on to CDs. This isn't particularly new, as dedicated inkjet printers for CDs have been around for a while. What is new is the brilliant quality of the results. The first generation of CD printers produced discs that looked very poor. Results from the 950 are stunning. And while nobody's going to use an inkjet to print labels on mass-produced CDs, it's a system that will work very well for home and small business users.

The CD software supplied provides templates and sample backgrounds and graphics. This makes printing CDs very easy. However the features, particularly the text controls, are fairly basic and many users will prefer to create their own from scratch.

Two-faced

We were disappointed by one omission from an otherwise-excellent feature set. Despite the promise of 'double-edged' printing in the printer's documentation, there's no duplex unit to turn the paper around inside the printer.

The double-edged printing facility just allows you to tell the drivers that you will be printing on both sides of the page so, for example, it only prints odd pages on the first run. You then have to refeed the sheets manually and print the even pages.

Mac OS X drivers aren't included in the box, but are available for download from the Download Library on Epson's Web site. In addition to the drivers, the supplied software includes a couple of utilities to help with printing photographs and one for printing on to CD.

We like the 950 a great deal. It's not perfect: we'd like to see a USB cable in the box and the manuals need improving. It's also expensive compared with other inkjets on the market. However, the feature set and the quality of the output more than outweigh these concerns. For anyone who wants to print photographs from a Mac on to a wide variety of media, this is about as good as it gets.