Epson Stylus Photo 950

Every now and then, a product comes along that redefines the market and grabs everyone's attention, but the Epson Stylus Photo 950 really takes the biscuit.

Don't be fooled by the straightforward model name and number - this isn't your average product revision. Not only does the 950 have a new seven-colour individual ink-tank cartridge system, but it can print directly on to CDs and will even cut your photo roll paper into individual photos without any white borders, and drop them into a catcher attached to the front.

The Stylus Photo 950 promises the sort of convenience that's too good to be true, so we had to put all the new features to the test. To print on CDs, you need to adjust the lever on the left, slide in the front sheet feeder with the CD-R tray on top, make sure it's exactly in line with the front sheet feeder's curves, flip the lever again to CD and you're ready to go. It's a lengthy process, and one you must remember to reverse when you go back to printing on paper again or you'll end up with some nasty paper jams.

Once you have the printer set up, you can design your CD using Epson's Print CD software, which is thankfully easy to understand, then just set the print media to CD-R and print. You'll probably find your first few prints are out of alignment, but this can be set up accurately through the software. You do, of course, have to use printable CDs - we used Sony's CDQ-74P1 printable media, which worked fine. The print quality on CD is superb, with bright colours and a glossy finish worthy of a genuine retail CD - a far more preferable solution to stick-on labelling.

The next interesting feature is the automatic paper cutter, which clips to the front, along with the cloth catcher. Once you've aligned it and attached the roll paper feeder to the back, you can print neatly cut borderless 100 or 150mm prints. What's more, by using Epson's PhotoQuicker software, you can set it to print several photos on a roll in one go, make a cup of tea and pick up your photos (along with a few strips of blank paper) from the catcher in a few minutes.

The only sore point is the maximum resolution of 1,440dpi for borderless printing on roll paper, resulting in much more noticeable banding than the 2,880dpi prints. This isn't quite the 'gallery quality' that Epson states on the Premium Glossy Photo Paper roll paper packaging, but the quality of the full-resolution prints more than make up for this.

Printing a full-size A4 photo at 2,880dpi took just seven minutes and nine seconds on the 950 - a good 13 minutes quicker than the Stylus Photo 895 (see Labs, issue 92, p76). But, more importantly, the print quality is absolutely superb. Everything from skin tones to skies and greyscales were handled beautifully, with smooth fades and colour transitions and no visible banding or grain. The prints have a slight brown tinge when first printed, but this disappears within a couple of minutes and, under the right storage and lighting conditions, Epson guarantees up to 20 years' lightfastness on the correct media, including its own Premium Glossy Photo Paper.

The one area where Epson inkjets have previously failed to excel is black text printing on plain paper, but this has now been vastly improved with the Stylus Photo 950. Epson has added another identical black cartridge to the mix, which has the result of much crisper and blacker text. The results from the draft 'speed' mode were sharp and black without a hint of the faded spidery characters of before, and even superior to the results from the Lexmark Z65 (see p115). Not only that, but it completed our 25-page letter test in just two minutes and 59 seconds, equating to a very reasonable 8.4ppm.