TechRadar: All Printers and scanners Feeds

Epson Stylus Photo R2880

Mark Sparrow — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 10:51:00 +0000

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?

Canon Pixma iP100

Tech staff — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 11:50:00 +0000

The Canon Pixma iP100 is a portable photo printer that can also print text documents. It will print on paper from business card size to A4, and comes with a large battery for travelling.

. It's not cheap, but we think it offers excellent quality, and is a rare find in a market churning out photo printers that just print 10 x 5 inch photos

Excellent photo printing

We'll start with the text printing. We expected document printing to be an afterthought, but it was fantastic for such a small printer.

Text was crisp and presentable even down to 4-point font size and put much bigger units to shame. Printing is a little slower that on bigger machines around the same price, but not so slow as to be inconvenient.

Two sheets of our standard test document printed in 20 seconds. The photo-printing side is equally impressive. Our test 10 x 15cm print was done in 53 seconds. The skin tones, contrast and details were all very good. The battery is fine for 300 prints, which seemed generous to us.

Superior build

The build quality is up to Canon's usual high standards, and the control panel only has two buttons, which will suit people who just want a photo back with no fuss.

The printer has two USB ports, one for printing from a camera via a cable, and one for connecting with your Mac. There's no Bluetooth connection in the box but a dongle can be bought to enable it.

The only niggling omission is the lack of camera-card slots or LCD, let alone an LED. For a printer designed for travelling, these features would have been handy. Just remember to pack your camera's USB cable.

Overall, we really liked this printer. It performs well enough to be either a desktop or portable printer. The speed and build are great and printing is superb for both photos and text. A rare gem.

Epson Perfection V200

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 15:31:00 +0000

The V200 is a great entry-level option. The captured resolution and colour representation are excellent for our needs.

It handles colour, black-and-white photos and text documents well. The lid is also placed on a rising hinge to help get thick books or wide margins onto the glass plate.

You only have four buttons to control, though mostly we just used EpsonScan software to capture the image. It's a very simple system.

User-friendly software

The Epson software bundle has always been very able. It now includes such treats as Auto Photo Orientation, which corrects wayward positioning, and a new auto-cropping feature that lets you throw two photos onto the plate, scan once, but get two separate files back.

This is a great timesaver. One problem we had in the past was the noise Epson scanners made while scanning (not unlike loading software from a cassette tape).

This issue has thankfully not lingered too badly in the Epson V200, which performed reasonably quietly for us.

Quick prints

You need to have realistic speed expectations for a scanner of this size and price. Speed is generally excellent for photos and documents; you get a preview back in eight seconds, and 300dpi A4 colour scans in 15 seconds.

Scanners like this are much slower at scanning film; to do the job right you need to set a higher resolution, and this bogs the scanner right down.

Our strip of four negatives scanned at 2,400dpi took just under six minutes to scan, which is quite slow. If you have bags of them to scan, you'd be better off with Epson's V750.

For more basic scanning, though, you can't knock the V200.

IRISCard Pro 4

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 12:57:00 +0000

The IRISCard Pro 4 is the latest update by IRIS for its portable card scanner and software bundle.

It scans business cards and saves them to the included software, from where you can export contacts to other apps including Apple's own Address Book.

The software includes solid OCR (optical character recognition) that reads the imported business card scans and saves recognised elements to appropriate data fields.

Speedy scanning

To test the bundle, we scanned a backlog of business cards that we had picked up at trade fairs and meetings.

We managed to scan around 14 cards per minute, and the manufacturer IRIS reckons you can scan 600 cards per hour using the bundle, which seems possible if you stick at it, and it's also pleasingly fast.

The cards scan quite clearly and the software makes short shrift of different card styles and shapes. It can be a bit fiddly to insert some cards, but you soon get into the swing of things.

The scans appear inside CardIRIS 3.6, the current version of the IRIS software. Its OCR ability is impressively accurate.

Export contacts

Equally impressive are the export options. You can export data for each contact as either individual .csv files or vCards for dropping into Address Book.

The support is OS level, so you are not just limited to Address Book – you can export to Entourage and Excel, among others.

It's possible to scan a card, import it to CardIRIS, export it as a vCard and drop into an Address Book group in under 30 seconds. It's both quick and accurate.

Great value

The two buttons on the scanner carry no labelling at all, and the user manual is woefully out of date. The software also failed to install on first attempt. The price tag took some swallowing too.

But compared to other IRIS products, which we tend to wrestle with, the value in this card-scanner bundle is obvious.

Now on version 4, it's a mature offering, and will be going along with our laptops to our MacLive Expo visit.

Epson PictureMate 290

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 10:02:00 +0000

Dear oh dear, the Epson looks more like a mop bucket than a printer!

Its slab-sided design, muted grey finish and crude-looking buttons are worrying, given that it's the most expensive printer on test.

However, its rugged wipe-clean design means it's the most practical of all for parties and other events where people want instant souvenirs and lots of them.

High quality prints

It incorporates a CD-writer, too, for guests who want digital images rather than prints.

The LCD is a good size, and it's sharp and contrasty, though images took a few moments to render at full resolution.

Our print times were around 43 seconds, which is only four seconds longer than the 39 seconds quoted, and the results are terrific.

Contrast, saturation and perceived sharpness were very high, and the Epson produced the most striking portrait shot of all, though the blue sky in our landscape shot looked a little grey and flat.

Canon Selphy ES2

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 11:00:00 +0000

The Selphy ES2 uses a completely different upright design compared with the CP750.

Its integrated paper/ink tray means its desktop footprint is much smaller, though it does produce a rather odd paper path, where the sheets first emerge from the front of the printer sideways before being rotated through 90 degrees and drawn back in for printing.

Disappointing prints

The print time quoted is longer than the CP750's but, in practice, our prints came out more quickly (though they still took 12 seconds longer than the quoted time).

Considering it's the most expensive of the two Canons, the ES2's results were a little disappointing. Most of the colours in our portrait shot were good, but our subject's skintones were pale and almost one-dimensional.

It was quite surprising, then, to discover the ES2's landscape image was just about the best of all, with rich, natural-looking greens and blues.

Lexmark X4650

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:49:00 +0000

The Lexmark X4650 is a multifunction device with scanning, printing and copying that lets you send files to and from the machine wirelessly or over USB.

You will need a wireless router compatible with IEEE 802.11g to exploit these features.

The unit has camera card slots for standalone printing, too, though with no LCD panel it's tough to print on-the-fly without attaching your camera and using it to browse the images – a shame it's missing.

Simple setup

Setting up the printer on one of our wireless networks was very easy. A colour-coded connection indicator on the printer helps, and Lexmark has done a good job of streamlining the process on its installation guide.

Printing wirelessly was fast enough to be used as our default method. There was not much latency to worry about. A single page of text took 12 seconds to appear.

The printer does give you the option of scanning directly to applications on your Mac, but failed to send a scan direct to iPhoto as directed on the onboard LED display.

Poor quality prints

The quality of the text printing isn't great, something we've noted before with Lexmark printers. There
was feathering on 8-point Baskerville, and alignment trouble.

For printing something to read you would be fine, but for presenting documents and letters you can get better for the money, such as the Canon MP600R.

Scanning was a high point. Scans were clear and arrived back on our Mac very quickly, again with no annoying latency issues. Colours were true and resolution not bad for an all-in-one.

Good value?

Overall, it was harder to bash this Lexmark release than previous home printers because most things here work well.

However, that said, printers are so good these days that it wouldn't be prudent to recommend this printer over a Canon or Epson model at this price point.

IRIScan Express 2

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 16:23:00 +0000

At first glance, the IRIScan Express looked like it could be great.

It's powered by the USB cable and the driver installed without a hitch. But when entering the serial number supplied to unlock our ReadIris 11 software, we were told it was 'invalid'.

A replacement number was sent, but was again 'invalid'. This meant we couldn't test the software for scanning direct to PDF, HTML or as a mail attachment. Without these tools the functionality and value of the scanner is limited.

Slow scanning

With the driver installed, though, you can still perform scans by inserting paper and photos into the scanning slot.

The quality of scans produced for text documents is readable, but it runs into trouble when dealing with different shades or grey in charts and graphics.

The speed is slow at 56 secs for an A4 document, and the scanning is poor compared to a flatbed scanner that costs around a third of the price.

AgfaPhoto AP2300

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 15:53:00 +0000

The AgfaPhoto AP2300 is sold in Argos stores and is a cheap dye-sub printer.

It's well specified, supporting all four of the main memory card formats currently in use, together with PictBridge printing.

It can also fix red-eye, enhance colour, contrast, brightness and sharpness and apply a small range of special effects and photo frames.

Accurate colours

The AP2300 isn't particularly quiet, but the print times are good - our test photos appeared in 65 seconds, just five seconds more than the time claimed.

This might be a cheap dye-sub, but it stood up pretty well against the rest in our tests. The colours in both the portrait shot and the landscape were accurate and the saturation was reasonable, too.

Our portrait subject's skintones looked a little flat, though, and there was perhaps fractionally less 'bite' in the fine detail compared with the rest. The differences, though, were small.

Sony DPP-FP95

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 16:17:00 +0000

The Sony DPP-FP95 is the most expensive of Sony's dye-sub photo printers.

Small, neat and well made, the FP95 has slots for all the major card formats, and not just Sony's proprietary Memory Sticks.

Speedy printing

It proved noticeably quicker at printing than the other dye-sub models, turning out finished prints in just 42 seconds in our tests, which is actually three seconds quicker than the quoted time.

Not only that, it has a good range of adjustments and effects, which are accessed via a straightforward icon-driven interface.

Interestingly, it has a high-definition HDMI output for connecting to a high-definition TV for sharper playback than you can get via a standard AV lead (though you don't get an HDMI lead with the printer).

Out of all the dye-sub printers we tested, it was the Sony that produced the best portrait shot.