Epson Stylus Photo R200

The R200 comes in at the bottom of the new Photo Stylus R range that began with the high-end R800. You get a lot of printer for your money though: it weighs in at over 5kg and feels unusually solid for a sub-£100 printer.

It's also one of the cheapest machines we've seen to boast CD-printing ability on appropriate media. The supplied CD design and print utility software strikes a good balance between simplicity and function, with enough control to produce a professional-looking CD or DVD including a photographic background and correctly curved text. Printing is a little slow, though, at around three minutes per CD.

You won't want to use the R200 if printing high-quality black text at speed is your priority. Draft mode is admittedly fast, with our mono 25-page text document flying out of the machine at ten pages per minute. But the result is text that looks as if it's been printed on a 20-year-old dot-matrix printer, with clear pixellated gaps in character verticals. When it comes to Normal-quality text on plain copier paper, the results are what we expect from Draft mode, characters appearing considerably less than 100 per cent black and with distinct feathering. In addition, poor ink placement accuracy gives slightly wobbly letters. In Normal mode our 25-page mono document took almost 12 minutes to appear, but only by upping the quality to Photo did we achieve what we'd consider an acceptable level of density to black text; in this mode the pages chugged out at around two minutes per page.

When it comes to photo printing, the R200 does far better - exceptionally well considering its price. It boasts a 5,760dpi horizontal resolution - an impressive figure that isn't matched by its vertical 1,440dpi. Banding - the perennial problem for inkjet printers - is undeniably evident in certain areas, notably skin tones, but to be fair you'll need to look very closely to see it. Colour balance from the six-ink system is as good as the best of Epson's range; not surprising considering they use the same inks. The differences lie in the mechanical tolerances of the paper feed and print head systems, and also the relatively large 3-picolitre drop size in comparison to the 1.5-picolitres of the Stylus Photo R800. The first result of this is the banding issue, and the second a loss of ability to resolve fine detail; subtle aspects tend to get lost in a muddle of colour.

Epson's printers are improving as far as photo-printing speed goes, with a 6 x 4in photo popping out after just one minute, 23 seconds in Best mode - almost as fast as the Canon i865 - but a full A4 photo took four minutes, 13 seconds.

Like Canon's units, the R200 has a rear-mounted paper tray. Consequently, sheets left in there for any length of time will get dusty and curl backwards. We much prefer the flat paper tray of HP's inkjets, such as the Deskjet 5150.

While there's no doubting that its photo-printing ability is very good, the R200's poor text handling limits its worth. As such, it's a way off the Deskjet 5150 as our favourite high-value workaday inkjet, and it doesn't stand up to Canon's i865 for photo printing.

Author: David Fearon