Epson Stylus Photo 700

It's been a while since Epson's Stylus Color 600 (reviewed issue 33, p124) and Photo printers (reviewed issue 35, p153) first took the inkjet market by storm. Back then, the move to a maximum resolution of 1,440dpi was a giant leap. This, combined with the six-colour printing offered by the Stylus Photo, gave users the ability to print near-photo-quality images.

Other manufacturers soon caught up - Lexmark hit the 1,200dpi mark with its 7000 (reviewed issue 33, p156) series of inkjets, and Hewlett-Packard, with its 890C (reviewed issue 38, p168) and 720C (reviewed issue 42, p162), responded by making the size of the ink dots smaller. Epson has now released its latest assault on the inkjet market; the Stylus Photo 700 and the Stylus Color 850 (reviewed p160).

Two main improvements have been made over the original Stylus Photo. The first concerns dot size and resolution. Epson has significantly reduced the size of the dots that are fired by the printer's piezo-crystal print head. The Stylus Photo 700's new 'super micro dot' size should produce finer detail and smoother, more subtle shading. Also, the resolution has been increased, from 720 x 720dpi to 1,440 x 720dpi, which is the same as the Stylus Color printers.

In practice, the smaller dot size made a significant difference. Using Epson's own Photo Glossy Paper (£6.50 for 20 A4 sheets, £5 for 20 6 x 4in sheets), the Stylus Photo 700's images have noticeably less grain than those produced with the Stylus Photo, to the point where the dots almost blend into one another. This is the closest an inkjet has come to being able to produce continuous tone images. In short, this printer produces the best-quality photographic images of any inkjet printer on the market, and is almost a match for the Alps MD1300 (reviewed issue 44, p160).

The most impressive advance, however, comes when using less expensive paper stock. The smaller dot size, as HP's latest DeskJet printers demonstrated, translates to less ink volume and weight on the paper. In practice this means that with Epson's photo-quality coated paper (£8.50 for 100 A4 sheets), you can go up to the maximum resolution without over-saturating the paper and, more importantly, plain-paper printing suffers from less ink bleed and feathering. In our tests, the Stylus Photo 700 still wasn't quite as good on plain 80g/m2 copier paper as HP's DeskJets or Canon's BJC 7000 (reviewed issue 39, p179), but it's much better than its predecessor and, notably, the Epson Stylus Color 850.

Text quality on plain paper is also a great improvement, but the clear feathering around the characters means it's not up to the laser-like quality you get from Lexmark's colour inkjets. It does mean, however, that the Stylus Photo 700 can be used as a general-purpose office printer as well as for stunning photographic images - a fact that will widen the printer's appeal greatly.

The second of the major improvements is in print speed. In testing, a 6 x 4in photo in best-quality mode on glossy photo paper took four minutes and six seconds, while a full-sized A4 photo, using the same settings and paper, took just over ten minutes with the printer connected to a Pentium/166 with 32Mb of RAM. Timings will vary depending on the speed of your PC, but it's significantly quicker than the first Stylus Photo. For text and office graphics work, though, you'll need some patience. On default settings - 360dpi, plain paper - a ten-page text document with minimal formatting took a lengthy eight minutes and 30 seconds to drop into the output tray for 1.2ppm (pages per minute), and in draft mode the same test gave only 2ppm. Mix in a few graphics and coloured charts, and the speed drops further to just below 1ppm in default settings. So, while the Stylus Photo 700 may be an improvement, it's no match for HP's speed demon, the DeskJet 890C.