Epson Stylus Color 900

The boundary between home and office printers has grown increasingly blurred in recent times. With their winning combination of high-quality print and speed, laser printers used to be the natural choice for the office, with inkjets being consigned to home use. The print quality of inkjets then started to approach laser standards, and with it their claims as office printers - with colour an attractive extra for anyone keen to produce eye-catching documents.

The Epson Stylus Color 900 is aimed squarely at the office market, with a big price gap to help distinguish it from the company's cheaper colour inkjets. The 900's main competitors in the office inkjet arena are Hewlett-Packard's 2000C (reviewed issue 49, p158) weighing in at £600, and Epson's own Stylus Color 850 (reviewed issue 45, p160), which is now ten months old and costs £271. What you get for your increased investment over cheaper inkjets can be summed up in one word: speed.

In the default mode for plain paper, the Color 900 managed a respectable 7.5ppm when printing our test plain-text document, slower than the 9ppm achieved by the Stylus Color 850 and the 8ppm of the HP 2000C. To put these speeds into perspective, the £232 Stylus Color Photo 750 (reviewed issue 54, p165) trails behind with just 4.3ppm. The 900 proved itself a reasonably speedy performer in our colour-printing tests, but lagged slightly behind the HP 2000C: in quick mode (the default) it managed 4.4ppm, compared to the HP 2000C's 5ppm. In real terms, there isn't a dramatic difference between the three when printing most types of document, so the deciding factor must be quality of print.

With the Stylus 900, Epson has reduced the size of the ink droplets even further. Its previous best was the 750's six picolitres, but now it's reached the bewilderingly small volume of three picolitres. Theoretically, this means even smoother graduation between colours and increased definition, but the proof is in the printing. Using Epson's coated paper, specially designed for 360dpi resolution, the Stylus Color 900 more than lived up to our high expectations. It produced faultless text and high-quality colours marred only by slight banding and dithering - considerably better than the Stylus Color 850 or HP 2000C. If you want colour documents fast, the 900 also managed presentable quality in its default mode, albeit with more dithering and a lack of definition.

Photos are also an excellent test of a printer's abilities, and this is where the 900 delivered perhaps its biggest surprise. Epson's proprietary Perfect Picture Imaging System has produced stunning photographic results since the Stylus Color 740 appeared, but it is known for being slow, taking three minutes longer than its main rivals. At maximum resolution, 1,440 « 720dpi, the 900 ran to form, printing our A4 photo in 12 minutes. Dropping to 720 « 720dpi, however, saw it reproduced in just five minutes, 27 seconds, and it took us almost as long to tell the difference between the two. The Stylus Photo 750 - with its six-colour ink cartridge compared to the Stylus 900's three-colour unit - still holds the edge in pure quality, though.

Physically, the Stylus 900 adheres to the Epson tradition in that it's bulky but well made. When printing, it stretches out a full 570mm front to back, and even in its most compact form measures 475 « 313 « 191mm (W « D « H). What will be of more concern to the office user though is the capacity of the paper tray. The Stylus 900 can only cope with 100 sheets of 64g/m2 A4 paper, compared to the HP 2000C's 150 sheets (or potential 400 if you use the optional lower tray). In a busy office, the 900 would soon run out of paper. One compromise might be to use the 900 as a secondary printer to a laser, which is easy enough to achieve thanks to the USB port at the 900's rear. Nor should the task of replacing cartridges be too arduous, as black ink cartridges last for 1,200 pages, and colour cartridges for 570 at five per cent coverage per colour.