Epson Stylus Color 670

Epson is unique among inkjet manufacturers: its name is synonymous with high-quality photo printing, yet it enjoys an equally prodigious reputation for building budget printers. Despite this, the Stylus Color 660 couldn't keep up with the high standard set in our inkjet printer Labs (see issue 67, p98) for either print quality or speed, and even its £79 street price wasn't enough to win it any plaudits for value for money. With the Stylus Color 670, Epson is hoping to strike back, boasting a new printer driver and a staggeringly low street price of £74.

This pitches the Stylus Color 670 directly against HP's DeskJet 840C (reviewed p163). Using the printers side by side, the first thing you notice is how much noise the Epson makes. If you're printing a 30-page document on the 670, you may find that you have to leave the room after a while for the sake of your nerves. In comparison, the DeskJet is virtually silent. Other than this, the Epson is a well-made piece of machinery, with no obvious weak areas. We were also pleased to see that just like the DeskJet 840C, but unlike the 660, the 670 includes USB and parallel connections.

Even though the 670 is near the bottom of Epson's inkjet printer range, we had high hopes for its photo printing abilities, and these hopes were largely borne out. It may only use four colours of ink, but at its highest resolution it can produce images extremely close to the quality of those from the seven-colour Stylus Photo 750 (reviewed issue 67, p129). The only signs of any compromise are in high contrast areas like surfaces bathed in sunlight, where individual dots are visible. It was also quite fast, taking eight minutes to print an A4 photo, which is four minutes quicker than the DeskJet 840C.

We were also impressed by the 670's colour accuracy. Out of the seven reference colours in our test, only two were obviously different from the Pantone versions, and the colours were also solid with no signs of banding. The improved printer driver was also in evidence for colour stepping, with the 670 showing none of the banding typical of the Stylus Color 660. As you'd expect with a printer at this price, however, the 670 struggled to resolve detailed fine lines, a trait it shares with the DeskJet 840C.

The 670 coped reasonably well with our CorelDRAW headdress test. This pushes a printer's ability to the limit, consisting of thousands of vector objects and large areas of graduated shading. Lower-priced printers don't tend to perform well, but we only had one major concern with the 670, and that was the coarseness of its dithering. Still, the HP DeskJet 840C was little better, and if you're only willing to spend this much on a printer you can't expect perfect results.

The only area where we were truly disappointed by the Stylus Color 670 was its text printing. There was obvious bleeding around the edges of text in standard quality on 80g/m2 paper, and it was noticeably poorer than the DeskJet 840C. If you're intending to use this printer for any sort of professional purposes you'll need to use Epson's own coated paper, but be aware that this slows the printer from 1.9ppm in standard quality on 80g/m2 paper to 1.3ppm.

This brings us to another of the 670's weaker areas, especially compared to HP's DeskJet 840C, namely speed. Epson claims top speeds of 5ppm in mono and 3.8ppm in colour, with the quality rating set to economy. Setting aside that the end result is extremely faint, this can't compare to HP's claims of 8ppm for mono and 5ppm for colour, and although claimed speeds should always be taken with a pinch or two of salt, we found that in general use the 840C was noticeably faster than the 670. The most clear-cut difference was in the 25-page plain text document, which the DeskJet completed in just under ten minutes, while the Epson carried on for a further three minutes, 40 seconds.