Product Reviews

Just when it looks like inkjets have reached their peak, something new and exciting comes along that takes us nearer to genuine photo quality. From a technological standpoint there may be a long way to go before digital images can completely match a faithful 35mm celluloid print, but if you can get near enough to fool the human eye then there's little to worry about. Epson's Stylus Photo 870 (reviewed issue 68, p159) took us a step closer with its edge-to-edge banner printing, and now the revised 890 can do the same on a full-sized A4 print.

The 890's edge-to-edge prints are surprising to look at, simply because you're not used to seeing something that looks so real being produced by a printer. It takes a while to output, particularly when printing right at the bottom, although a full-sized A4 print is out in just 14 minutes, ten seconds at 1,440dpi. This adds a new depth of realism to the prints, although if you want the top 2,880dpi resolution you'll have to put up with a white border.

This is well worth doing though, if you want the best photo quality. The 2,880dpi photo results were the best I'd ever seen, without even the slightest hint of banding, no discernible grain and the smoothness expected from an original print. This detail is, in part, thanks to Epson's Ultra Micro Dot technology, which can choose appropriate drop sizes between three and six picolitres depending on the level of detail required. The only criticism is the time it takes to print, which at 24 minutes, 29 seconds for an A4 print is quite exhausting. The ink is also spread quite richly at this resolution, which leads to finer detail being lost in the darker areas, so you may want to tweak the brightness settings in the driver to attain the best results.

The banner printing facility is still there if you want smaller photos, and the best media to use remains Epson's Premium Glossy Photo Paper. This provides fantastic-looking photos although, as we discovered a few months ago, it's best to archive your results under glass to avoid the coloration changes over time (see Labs, issue 77, p101) and achieve Epson's claimed ten-year light-fastness.

So, the 890 should be your first choice for photo printing, but what if you want to print

ADVERTISEMENT

other things like text and graphics? With a claimed mono print speed of 9.6ppm for a mono page in Economy mode it ought to be pretty good, and with a basic 25-page letter test we managed to get a reasonable 6.8ppm. However, the text quality in this mode, while readable, was a faint shade of grey, with significantly broken characters and banding. You wouldn't want to print a genuine letter in this mode, so it's best to up the settings out of Economy for black text on plain paper. We still managed to get a respectable 1.9ppm in Standard mode with a dramatic increase in quality, although it was still a long way behind the crisp and precise black text of the HP DeskJet 990Cxi (see Labs, issue 77, p106) or Lexmark's budget Z42 (see Labs, issue 77, p111).

This is only on plain paper, though. If you're prepared to wait a little longer and use Epson's coated Photo Quality Inkjet Paper you can get superb high-resolution results in both text and graphics. You can print at up to 1,440dpi on this paper, and even the standard Quality setting delivers respectable DTP results. The text is clear and sharp, although occasionally still a bit shaky, and the graphics are printed faithfully with minimal grain and banding.

Tough tests, like printing diagonally and white text on a black background, are handled admirably too. Even the 11 minutes, 55 seconds taken to produce a high-quality four-page Adobe PageMaker document was well worth waiting for. The PC Pro colour fade tests were also printed smoothly with minimal grain, although there was occasional stepping. Colour blocks were similarly slick, but greyscales had a slight brown hue from a slightly inaccurate composite make-up.

The Stylus Photo 870 was introduced to us at £203, so it comes as a slight surprise that its latest successor only costs a mere £169. Strangely enough the mono cartridge also costs £3 more than the five-colour unit, but neither of them are exorbitantly priced. The only issue is that the cartridges only contain ink, so unlike the HP and Lexmark models, once the print-head fails you're likely to be looking at a new printer, although this should be a few years off.

Otherwise, at £169, the Stylus Photo 890 offers incredible value for money and the best photo quality available from any current inkjet printer in this class. The ability to print full-sized edge-to-edge A4 prints has brought us another step closer to realistic photo printing, and, so long as you use reasonable quality coated paper, you can expect professional graphics and DTP results too. The plain paper black text printing isn't brilliant, but it's still usable if you apply the high-quality detail settings. This shouldn't be an issue if photo printing is what you're after though, and if that's what you want then the Stylus Photo 890 is easily the best route to take.