Product Reviews

Epson's Stylus Color 600 and 800 (both reviewed issue 33, p124) both made a good impression, largely on the basis of the outstanding print quality made possible by their 1,440 x 720dpi resolution and very small ink droplet size.

The Stylus Color 1520 uses the same print engine, is capable of the same near-photo quality printing, but is a wide carriage printer with other options targeted at CAD/CAM and graphics designers.

The main difference between the 1520 and its smaller siblings is the ability to handle paper up to A2, including A3, Super A3, Ledger and a variety of B and US sizes. Epson also quotes paper weights from 64 to 90g/m2, and although I had no problems with 130g/m2 card, Epson doesn't recommend it.

Side and top margins are a respectable 3mm, but the bottom margin is 14mm, making the printing of letterheads awkward if you want details at the bottom. Even though the printer will take A2 paper, the maximum printable width is 345mm. If you want a full A2 print, you'll need the Stylus XL Plus, or the four-cartridge Stylus 3000.

The standard paper feed is via a 100-sheet front-loading tray, and the paper path is a tight curve round and back out the front of the machine. There's also a top-feeding single-sheet feeder and a rear-entry manual feed. The rear feed should be used for banner paper or continuous feed, and this slot is equipped with a tractor feed. An optional (£19) banner feed kit is available to support banner paper. A postscript RIP should be available by the time you read this.

As well as standard serial and bidirectional parallel interfaces, an optional interface slot can take an Ethernet (£359), LocalTalk (£130), coaxial or twinaxial network card.

Perhaps the biggest drawback to this printer is that it uses two ink cartridges, with black in one and the three colours (cyan, magenta and yellow) in the other. With a printer aimed at designers, CAD/CAM and graphics artists, the likelihood of colours being used unevenly increases, which means you could end up wasting ink of two colours when the third colour in the tricolour cartridge runs out.

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Epson quotes 300 A4 pages for the colour cartridge, at five per cent coverage in 360dpi, but actual results will depend on what you print. Photo printing obviously lays down much more ink and exhausts a cartridge much faster than a report.

The combination of high resolution and small ink droplet size mean that ink dries almost as it hits the paper and is very resistant to bleeding. Print definition is very good and produces good-quality results on plain paper.

For best results, you need special Epson papers. These are available in a variety of sizes and types. In addition to coated Photo Quality paper, there's also Glossy Photo paper and plastic-coated Glossy Film. The best photographic results come from the Glossy Film, but at around £1.50 per sheet of A4, and £4 per sheet of A3 at list prices, it's not cheap. Having said that, it's a lot cheaper than an A3 photographic enlargement. Transparencies up to A3, photo-quality index cards, backlit film and self-adhesive media are also available.

The printer driver achieves a good balance between ease of use and degree of control. You can run the 1520 in automatic mode, simply setting the paper type and adjusting a slider between speed and quality, which changes the resolution. Further down in the driver options are settings for overriding the dither pattern and adjusting the brightness, contrast and saturation of the inks, as well as the balance between cyan, magenta and yellow. Your modified settings can be saved and given a profile name, and the 1520 is compatible with Apple ColorSync and Microsoft Image Color Matching systems, with profiles supplied for both.

Print speed is always difficult to assess, as it depends so much on what's printed. On my test system of a P166 with 32Mb of RAM, a Photo CD image, resampled to fit an A3 page at 72dpi, took 25 seconds for the driver to start sending data to the printer and just less than eight minutes to print. A high-resolution A4 image took four minutes, 11 seconds to print. Both prints were on Photo Quality inkjet paper.

Also included in the package is a Color Pak containing Sierra Print Artist, Adobe PhotoDeluxe and a collection of fonts, clip-art and high-res photos. This is the same bundle as is included with the cheaper A4 printers, and although it makes sense with those machines, is likely to be of little interest to the target buyer of the 1520.

As with the smaller-format Stylus 600 and 800, print quality is very good, and speed, though not rapid, is reasonable for the type of printer. At a street price of under £600, it's also good value, but the premium over the cheaper A4 printers means you really do have to want the larger-format printing.