Refilling the Epson Stylus Photo R2880 A3+ printer will set you back £90 a time.

But some things are worth it. The print quality of this high-end photo printer is very good indeed.

Epson has a great reputation when it comes to printing excellence and part of the company's secret is ink; the other is the LUT technology.

Clever printer technology

LUT stands for Look-Up Table. This is a special technology that can closely match the RGB colours on your computer screen. The result is better grain, smoother tones and improved colour. Does it work?

Yes it does. It's subtle but it can turn out better prints, although with A3+ prints taking around six minutes to materialise from the R2880, LUT obviously takes its time to pick those colours properly.

Let's get back to those UltraChrome K3 inks for a moment. The R2880 uses Vivid Magenta ink for improved colour and this is partly because the printer uses pigment inks rather than dye-based ones.

Traditionally, pigmented inks suffer from being a little dull because their colour gamut isn't as wide as dye-based inks. The advantage of using pigment inks is the extended life and light-resistance of the print. With the R2880, fade resistance is quoted at 85 years for colour prints under display conditions and 200 years for monochrome.

Black and white printing strengths

There's an option to replace the matte black ink that the R2880 has on board (for text) with a photo black cartridge that works alongside the light black and light-light black inks. The result is black and white printing that has absolutely no trace of a colour cast or metamarism.

In fact, the R2880 has black and white printing well and truly nailed. There's even an advanced black and white section in the printer driver for adding a colour cast – should you really want to do such a thing!

However, there's one small drawback with using the photo black ink. Every time you switch inks between the matte and the photo blacks, the printer purges itself. In doing this it purges the other colours, too, and the result is a a little waste.

It would probably be better if Epson had made it possible to have matte black and photo black cartridges installed at the same time.

Thinking big

But that's enough about ink for now. What else does the Epson R2880 have to offer? Well, as we've already mentioned, it's an A3+ printer so large borderless prints are easy to create.

There's also a feeder for paper rolls, which will please those who like to print wide panoramas. In addition, there's a front feeder for specialist media up to 1.3mm thick. You can also print on CD/DVD using the supplied disc tray.

At the rear of the printer there are two USB ports for limited networking, enabling you to share the R2880 between two computers. An ethernet port would have been a nice addition for use in a small art studio, but then you can't have everything, can you?