The Stylus Photo R300 sits near the top of a new range of machines designed with photography enthusiasts in mind.Its a full six-colour printer, with light cyan and light magenta inks supplementing the core cyan, magenta, yellow and black.The aim is to improve rendition of light tones in areas like skies and skin.
At bottom right behind a hinged and sprung acrylic door is a set of memory card slots and a USB port, for connecting either a digital camera supporting PictBridge or an external Zip or CD drive. A similar USB socket at the back of the printer, this time to the USB 2.0 standard, connects the printer to a PC so you can use the R300 for conventional hardcopy duties. ![]() Epson has gone for an alternative scheme, where the mono LCD is just used for control menus, error messages and a status display. You can then use both screens to select and print your images. Its cheaper to buy the printer with the monitor screen included, as the price difference is then only around 50 on the street. Epson Stylus Photo R300 Bluetooth Adapter OptionTheres a Bluetooth adapter option too, so you can print from a notebook, PDA or camera-equipped mobile phone. Epson Stylus Photo R300 Professional Finish ThanThis gives a much more professional finish than printing on labels and sticking them onto the CD, though theres a price premium for this type of media. Epson Stylus Photo R300 Driver Includes OptionsThe driver includes options for multi-page sheets, watermarks and manual duplexing, though not for over-printing. However, the time of two minutes 21 seconds is pretty poor, averaging not much more than two pages per minute. Its some way off the 15ppm draft mode speed quoted by Epson. The R300 produces strong black text and vibrant, dense colour graphics, but it really comes into its own on photographs, as you might expect. Here colours are natural and smooth, with graduated areas particularly clean. This error was frequent enough to prevent us leaving the printer to complete a job while we got on with other work and although its perhaps unlikely you would leave a photo printer to print large jobs, it is irritating when you cant rely on its paper pick-up. With Epson Premium Glossy Photo paper still costing around 40p for an A4 sheet (the cheapest we could find) the overall cost comes out at 52.4p for a 30 per cent colour page. Note thats 30 per cent, rather than 20 per cent, because of the six-colour printing system. A five per cent black text page comes out at around 2.4p. Both figures are reasonable for a printer in this category. However, theres a query over its ability to feed plain paper consistently, and dont be tempted to rush out a text document on it the text speed is low. If you go for one of these, its worth paying the extra for the colour LCD screen at purchase, rather than upgrading later. We use industry standard tests in order to compare features properly.
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