Epson Stylus Photo R800

Reviewed on 5/7/04    Updated on: 7/6/04    Release date: 2/15/04   

Editors' note: The ratings for this product have been updated to reflect changes in the competitive landscape for photo printers.

If you've been eyeing the Epson Stylus Photo 2200 but balking at its price, get ready to pull out your wallet. Its letter-size sibling, the Stylus Photo R800, delivers equal or better print quality at a much faster speed and a much more attractive price. While its printhead can be a little finicky, the R800 still makes the top of our shopping list. But before you buy, you might want to consider the cheaper, fuller-featured, and less high-maintenance HP Photosmart 7960, as well.

Design of Epson Stylus Photo R800

Like every other inkjet printer on the market, Epson dresses the Stylus Photo R800 in black and silver plastic. The input and output paper trays cleverly fold into the printer to minimize volume, and I really like that the top tray folds down into a relatively flat surface, which makes it perfect for holding piles of paper. While the R800 isn't small, curved, or sleek, it uses a captive power cable rather than the brick AC adapter that allows many printers to save room on the desk. I'd take an adapter-free printer over one with a marginally smaller footprint.

Though it can print on CDs and DVDs, the R800 lacks a straight-through paper path, which may discourage those who like to experiment with media. Overall, the Epson's L-shaped paper path works well with a variety of media sizes and weights, although in my dusty office, a covered input tray--the kind used by HP--would be a lot more practical.

Four icon-labeled buttons populate the front panel; they control the roll-paper input feed mechanism, the paper-feed and job-cancellation functions, ink cartridge loading, and the power. All but the roll-paper button have bright LEDs so that you can spot a low-ink warning or an empty paper tray from across the room. It's very easy to change the individual ink cartridges (eight in all), and Epson provides a helpful instructional diagram with a list of the cartridges' manufacturer IDs.

With the 2200, you have to swap the Matte Black and Photo Black cartridges as needed, but the R800 has room for both, so no switching is necessary. But the R800 lacks the 2200's ink-out light panel, which tells you which cartridges are low or empty. Instead, the carrier goes the extra distance to sit underneath a plastic arrow that points you to the cartridge--a less elegant solution.

Features of Epson Stylus Photo R800

This isn't a printer for the snapshot photographer. It's easy enough to use, thanks to a swap-free cartridge lineup and a driver that has dual Advanced and Basic personalities. But the shoot-and-print audience would probably be better off with features such as a built-in card reader and a straight-through paper path for thick stock rather than this model's ability to print on CDs and DVDs, its extremely flexible driver, and its roll-paper feeder. The R800 comes with drivers for most recent flavors of Windows, as well as Mac OS 8.6 through 9.2.x and OS X 10.1.3 or later. However, the R800 doesn't support PictBridge for printing directly from a digital camera.

Epson claims that the R800 expands on the 2200's color gamut, the range of hues it can print. Epson's latest version of its UltraChrome pigmented ink set, which debuts in this model, supplements the traditional cyan, magenta, yellow, and Photo Black or Matte Black selection with red and blue inks. That, plus a gloss optimizer, which keeps blacks looking shiny on glossy paper, brings the total to eight cartridges. The R800 has a nominal resolution of 5,760x1,440dpi, and the printheads have 180 nozzles each. You can connect the printer via USB or FireWire--a welcome touch if, like me, you already have seven devices plugged into your USB hub. FireWire also provides a high-speed connection option for older, pre-USB 2.0 Macs. If you're feeling adventurous, you can connect two systems to the printer simultaneously; just don't send a print job until the previous one is finished (there's no built-in spooler).

The Basic and Advanced modes of the driver provide identical page layout and maintenance tasks but differ in the complexity of their selectable color and quality settings. You have a myriad of options, from almost fully configurable to fully automatic. At the most granular level, the printer lets you manually set brightness, contrast, and saturation; the density of the cyan, yellow, and magenta inks; how to apply the relevant color profile using Saturation, Perceptual, Absolute Colorimetric, and Relative Colorimetric mapping; and choose an output gamma of 1.5, 1.8, or 2.2. You can also turn off printer color management entirely and use software profiles, which many Photoshop users (including myself) tend to do.

For intermediate users, PhotoEnhance mode lets you apply several effects, such as Soft Focus and Parchment; adjust sharpness; and select a tonal preset, such as Vivid or Sepia. A Digital Camera Correction check box enables what is referred to in the Advanced mode as edge smoothing, which blurs the edges of low-resolution digital camera and Web images in order to prevent jaggies. In practice, I usually see little to no difference using this setting, with the exception of visible oversharpening on hair. For minimalists, the driver lets you choose from quality options such as Text And Image, Photo, and Best Photo, as well as pick paper type and select borderless printing for 4x5, 5x7, 8x10, and panoramic photos.

As with any good printer, the R800 has options for reducing or enlarging the source item; printing multiple pages on a single piece of paper, booklets, or double-sided documents; and adding a watermark. And not only does this printer tell you when your ink is low, then gone, it has a Buy Ink button that takes you to Epson's Web store.

So with all this control, what could I possibly have to complain about? The driver doesn't reveal any resolution information, nor does it let you set output resolution manually. The only applicable item that Epson shares in the manual is that Photo RPM mode prints at the maximum resolution. But I still don't know what Best Photo means.

Performance of Epson Stylus Photo R800

In addition to excellent print quality, the Stylus Photo R800 is the hare to the rest of Epson's tortoise-slow printers. It suffers from a quirk that impatient users might find to be deal breaker, however (see the "Print quality" section below for more).

Speed and operation
The Epson Stylus Photo R800 is among the fastest inkjets we've tested--and it's the company's quickest by a long shot. It takes only 2.7 minutes to print out a high-quality photo fit to a letter-size page. This is a big improvement for Epson, which has been known to sacrifice speed for quality. Don't plan on using the R800 for more than the occasional text document, however; its throughput of about 2ppm (pages per minute) can't compare to that of more multipurpose-oriented inkjets. For example, the HP Photosmart 7960 can pump out text at close to 4.6ppm.

The R800 also has an improved printhead carrier mechanism, which allows it to operate quietly and more efficiently. In previous models, the printhead would move back and forth several times before finally stopping in the correct spot to change inks. Now, the carrier just heads there and parks. Like all Epson inkjet printers, the R800 stops printing if one of its ink cartridges runs out--a mixed blessing. On one hand, it helps keep you from wasting ink. On the other, when you're close to draining several cartridges and want to use each cartridge as long as possible, you'll have to deal with endless pop-up warnings and replacing a different cartridge every few minutes.

Thankfully, the ink cost is very competitive with comparable models'. Based on my calculations, it takes about 21 cents worth of ink to print a 4x6-inch photo and 71 cents for an 8x10. If you include the cost of Epson's best Premium Glossy Photo Paper, the totals come to 33 cents and $1.10, respectively. Your actual mileage may vary, of course.

Print quality
First, the good news: I was extremely impressed with the R800's prints, most notably its black-and-white photos. Not only are they incredibly sharp and detailed, with very good dynamic range and neutral grays, they also show far less metamerism--the tendency to develop different color casts under different lights--than other photo printers, including the Stylus Photo 2200. The addition of a gloss overcoat for blacks is another improvement over its big brother, whose blacks on glossy paper look matte compared to the rest of the inks.

Color photos look very good as well, and the printer can produce the neutral, color-accurate output important to enthusiasts as well as saturated, consumer-friendly photos. I compared some blue- and red-intensive photos from a variety of printers to see if the addition of those primaries improved the R800's color reproduction. However, I couldn't spot any significant differences, nor could I detect any real variation between the Photo RPM (5,760x1,440dpi) prints and the Best Photo-quality ones. In fact, output resolution that high is more useful for line art and text, for which it's unfortunately unavailable, than for most photos.

The quality carries across a variety of paper types, from a 24-pound bright-white plain paper to Epson's best glossy. If you're planning to use plain paper for drafts and the good stuff for final prints, you'll have to create some paper-specific color profiles since plain-paper prints have a stronger cyan cast than those produced on the better paper. Though graphics output at the default Fine setting yielded fairly mediocre results, resulting in relatively jagged lines and font edges, I saw excellent, sharp text and graphics, even on good plain paper, when I upped the quality to Best Photo.

Which brings me to the bad news: as with most Epson printers--it's been true for every model I've used for the past 10 years--the Stylus Photo R800 has a serious quirk to which you must cater if you want consistently good prints. If you change from a high-quality setting to a lower one, essentially decreasing print resolution, you're going to get the ugly striations that often indicate a clogged nozzle. I usually circumvent this issue by printing everything at the highest resolution rather than running endless head-cleaning cycles, but less forgiving users might want to steer clear of Epson altogether.

---

reviews.cnet.com/4505-3156_7-30608012.html