Product Reviews

Inkjet photo printers cracked the quality issue some time ago, and speed and features have now taken over in the race for sales. The Stylus Photo 935, for example, replaces the Epson Stylus Photo 925 and is positively brimming with standalone features.

There's a handy six-in-one card reader for starters, as well as direct printing via USB from a good range of supported digital cameras - a list of compatible devices is available at www.epson.co.uk. There's also the facility to connect a compatible USB mass-storage device, while Bluetooth is an option for £65 - a little pricey but potentially useful nonetheless.

But that's not the end of the Epson's feature list. There's also an LCD status panel, which provides basic options to specify layouts or produce index prints, with a reasonably intuitive menu system. What's more, a 2.5in colour LCD preview screen is available for £65 if you want to make the most of the standalone features.

However, more professional photographers will want to edit their photos on a PC before printing, and when connected to a PC Epson's software suite will perform basic uploading and editing functions, as well as the usual features such as red-eye reduction.

But the 935 really comes in to its own when it's printing photos, especially with Epson's Premium semi-gloss photo paper. The quality is among the best we've seen, easily

The 935 also offers completely borderless printing on all sizes up to A4 and with no noticeable loss of quality. Paper roll media is supported too, with a holder supplied as standard.

Unfortunately, though, the 935 slips up on speed, with an A4 borderless print taking a lengthy nine minutes, eight seconds - and that's in high-speed mode. Turn that off and you're looking at just under 15 minutes, albeit for top quality. Compare that to the Canon i9100 (see issue 107, p69), which completed the same image in two minutes, 40 seconds and with near-identical quality.

In theory at least, the 935 is cheaper to run than the Canon, with its six-colour cartridge system working out at 12.3p per A4 colour page at 30 per cent coverage compared to the Canon's 17.5p. However, the cost per mono page at 5 per cent coverage is greater than the Canon's 2.9p.

Mono printing is the Epson's other main problem. Fair enough, it was never designed to be a workhorse text printer, but the plain paper results were still disappointing, with indistinct edges compromising text crispness. It's fine for occasional letters, but that's about it. The printer also failed to match the quoted 8ppm, with even draft quality reaching only 4.8ppm in our tests, and this slowed down to 1.7ppm in Fine mode.

Despite the 935's reasonable asking price and higher resolution, the quicker, more versatile Epson Stylus Photo 950 remains our photo printer of choice. But if you're after a standalone photo printer, the 935 offers great-quality prints at a fair price.