Product Reviews

With a large 3½in colour screen and a wealth of buttons and menu options, Epson's Stylus Photo R360 doesn't look like a typical inkjet. Although it's perfectly capable of running off letters and charts, it is designed to excel at photo printing. Beneath its lid are six of Epson's Claria photo ink cartridges, including light cyan and light magenta inks to produce more subtle shading and colours, while a card reader and PictBridge port allow you to print directly from a digital camera, USB flash drive or a range of popular camera memory card formats, including SD, SDHC, CompactFlash, Memory Stick Pro, Microdrive and xD.

We put the R360 through its paces using our usual range of test documents, but the overall results were disappointing. A draft speed of 12.2 pages per minute (ppm) produced perfectly readable prints, but their pale reddish-brown text would not be suitable for anything but quick reference or proofing. Correspondence-quality text documents suffered from more serious problems and were slow to print at 3.4ppm, with a single page taking 22 seconds. Most of the letters were dark and clear, but occasional

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lines of text were struck through with inexplicable jagged lines. Our mixed-colour document prints fared better and were printed at a quick 2.3ppm. Colours were accurate, but dark shades were spotted with pale specks. These were also visible on our greyscale prints, and made large areas of black colour appear greyish.

The R360's document printing was flawed, but we couldn't fault the quality of its photos, which are among the best we've seen from a home photo printer. Colour accuracy and shading were perfect, and we couldn't see any dithering or grain, even close up. Skin tones were true to life and even dark, low-contrast images were rendered with clarity and distinction. Photos even had a reflective sheen like those from a professional printer. Print speeds weren't that fast, but six high-quality 6x4in photos emerged in a little over 13 minutes.

To make matters worse, the R360 is expensive to run. Although mono print costs are a reasonable 2.2p per page, a 6.6p colour page combines with that to produce a total page cost of 8.8p. This isn't surprising with six inks to buy, but it makes document printing more costly than other inkjets.

If you're looking for a high-quality photo printer and aren't worried about running costs, the Stylus Photo R360 is an excellent choice. Its photos are astonishingly good, and its large screen and memory card slots allow you to print without being tied to a PC. At £80 this is an excellent buy, as long as document printing isn't a priority.

If documents and photos are of equal importance to you, go for the Best Buy-winning Canon PIXMA iP4300 instead. Its photos aren't as good as the R360's, but it's a great all-rounder with low running costs.