A photo quality inkjet printer with a bonus. The Epson Stylus Photo R200 can print text, photos and just for good measure given the right media it can even print on CDs.
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The R200 is a six ink cartridge printer and by that colour printing costs should be somewhat reduced as you only need to replace the empty cartridges, with a black and a colour (four ink) you would need to replace the colour when only a single constituent is empty. With this Epson six ink offering you get Black two blue shades two red shades and a single yellow.
It is possible to print borderless images at up to A4 and the potential resolution is 5760DPI while the ink droplet size is down to 3pl. Should you own some Epson digital cameras it is possible to print direct to the printer without recourse to the PC.
It is also possible to print directly onto CD Media using the special CD tray included. I have tried this on a previous compatible Epson printer and it works well, unfortunately currently I have none of the specially coated CDs required to test this feature on the R200.
An A3 sheet covers the setup and installation of the printer and the software. The only item left slightly ambiguous was the cartridge installation with six cartridges and only a very indistinct image to show you the correct installation order.
The unit is 44x27(+14 for paper output tray)x24cm, it has three buttons on the top that control the unit, however in most cases the right hand one on/off is the only one you will need.
In normal text the output is quite acceptable. All printer speed tests are conducted in draft mode and this is grey rather than black and not really acceptable. I managed 7PPM printing a real 1500 word document spread over four pages. While the nonsensical 200 word offering used to test printer speed produced 9PPM.
Print output for images was nice with four 9x13cm images printed on an A4 page using the built in Windows Photo Printing Wizard took 250 seconds from start of printing to delivering the page.
The printer is available from Dabs at £89.30, this price point is sort of falling between two stools being higher than entry level and far less than top of the range. I suppose my tests confirm this. As a text printer it is not fast and draft mode is not really useable. However normal mode output is quite acceptable. As a photo printer the output is nice without being outstanding, middle price range middle quality, quite acceptable but not outstanding. In its favour it has the ability to print on CDs and is six ink and at this price point that could be unique.
Link :http://www.epson.co.uk/product/printers/photo/styphotor200/index.htm
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