Labs

Epson's PictureMate 290 might cost a lot but it does more than other photo printers. It's the only printer here with an integrated CD/DVD writer, so you can back up photos from memory cards to discs. It has built-in Bluetooth so you can print wirelessly from a camera phone, and an optional battery pack lets you print on the move.

We were disappointed by the quality of the prints, though. When printing from a PC, the printer has a maximum resolution of 5,760x1,440dpi, but the highest-quality prints can be achieved only when the Enhance Fine Detail box has been ticked. Some photos looked great, particularly high-contrast images with bright colours

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and dark backgrounds, but the printer had difficulty reproducing delicate shading. This was visible in subtle transitions of colour in a blue sky, which looked jagged and grainy with visible pixels. Dark, muted tones had a cyan tint, and black-and-white images suffered the same problem unless we put the printer into black-and-white mode first.

These flaws were particularly noticeable when compared to prints made by Epson's older PictureMate 240. Individually, none of these would be a major problem, but the overall picture quality was inferior to that of some of the cheapest printers in the group.

The PictureMate 290 takes one combined ink cartridge, which uses four colours. The addition of black ink produced excellent quality and depth in dark areas. You can get 150-sheet ink and paper packs for around £25, resulting in a print cost of 16.6p per photo.

We were expecting great results from the most expensive printer in the group, but while Epson's PictureMate 290 has loads of features and produced some good-quality photos, some of its prints contained flaws and problem areas that the lower-cost printers here managed to avoid. It failed to live up to the results we saw from its predecessor, the PictureMate 240.