Epson Stylus® R800 InkJet Printer

I just got the new Epson R800 tonight. Eagerly awaiting its release, I've been reading reviews on digital photography sites about how great a photo printer this is supposed to be. So far, I haven't been disappointed! (The most thorough review (14 pages!!) is at http://www.photo-i.co.uk/Reviews/interactive/Epson%20R800/page_1.htm)

To really give it a workout, I started with several professional digital photos from a wedding, and a few high-end scanned photos. Lots of contrast and blacks alternating with bright colors and fleshtones, which puts all of the toughest tasks together in a few pictures. The blacks are incredibly black, but still retain the detail of folds in clothing. There is no banding and no matter how close you look, you can't see any inkdots. (I hear that the 1.5 picoliter dots are actually SMALLER than film grain. More on that later.) Fleshtones are natural and bright colors are vivid. Reds and Blues really jump off the paper, due to the red and blue ink cartridges that supplement the normal cyan, magenta, yellow and black. Actually, there are two black cartridges: gloss and matte. The eighth cartridge is a gloss. The gloss evens out the print, so that you don't get more glare from the light colors like you do with any other color printer. In the end, NO ONE can tell that a print (made from a high-quality picture file, printed at high-quality on premium photo glossy paper) did not come from the photolab. Just to back that up, I am currently printing 300 honeymoon pictures I took on my 5.1 Megapixel digital camera. To compare these with the several rolls of 35mm pictures we took with a high-end camera...well, there IS no comparison. The printed pictures are better. A lot better. They are sharper, richer, and deeper. One picture (of a winding little street in Paris) was so real, I was looking for my old 3D glasses. A lot better. So much so, I'm packing up my developer and throwing away my 35mm camera. Oh, and did I mention it also prints on roll paper (4inch and 8inch) to print panoramas and prints directly on CDs, too?

So, with all this great quality, what are the cons? Well, it's still slow. On the highest quality setting, expect to wait 5 minutes 24 seconds for a 4x6 photo. But, the 45-second print time for the regular setting isn't too bad, and the prints are still good. Second, the consumables are gonna set you back. Add it up: there are 8 cartridges at $11.99 apiece. That's pushing $100, if you had to replace all of them at once. And of course, if you really use the printer's capabilities to print 8x10 high-quality pictures, they won't last long. Fortunately, you aren't likely to do run out all at once. The red and blue cartridges should last you a good while, and having two blacks makes black last a little longer, too.