Epson Stylus Photo R300/R300M

The R300 is hard to beat if you are in to printing photos or printing your own custom greeting cards as I do. It produces brilliant, realistic images beyond what you might expect in that price range. I also love the feedback you get from the Epson R300 print driver, such as ink level monitoring.

Brilliant, realistic colors on photos and greeting cards.
A very versatile print driver which allows for ink level monitoring and printer maintenance.

Ink cartridges don't last very long and refills are expensive.

None.

Never used.

This review is for the Epson R200 which has the same print engine as the R300. Frankly, if you don't need all the bells and whistles, this is the printer to get. Its got Epson's highest resolution engine (at the moment), six ink capacity (dye inks), and a bargain price! Picture quality? Once you figure it out its excellent. I don't use any of the auto enhancement features but instead run all of my images through Jasc Paint Shop v8. I manually adjust the images first till they look right on the screen. THE important setting on the printer driver is Color Mode. Use Epson Standard Mode if you clean up the image yourself before printing. Use Epson Vivid if you want the printer to enhance the image. So far I've used Epson Matte Heavyweight, Epson Colorlife, and Epson Premium Glossy. Click the proper paper in the print driver and you get great results. Another advantage of Epson over Canon is a wide paper choice at a reasonable price. Uou really do want to stick to your manufacturers papers unless you know what you're doing. All three of the papers I mentioned can be found for good prices on the web and have very long image permanence for a dye based system. I prefer the added life of the dye based prints over pigment. These papers give you comparable life to a photographic color print.

Great pictures Low price Excellent print driver - shows ink levels! Epson has wider availability of pro inks and papers than Canon Prints CD's

Documentation is inadequate.

This printer was purchased to replace an old HP 935 printer which I would rate as O.K. when it came to photos. The Epson R300 / R300M on the other hand produces high quality pictures which are as good as (and in some cases better) than having your photos printed by a photo developer when used with the good photo papers. The P.I.M and Exif print settings appear to have a major effect on the printed colours. This may be the reason why some reviewers have said the colours are wahsed out whilst others have said that they are vivid. The print speed on the printer is decent and the software included allows the sprinter to double-up as a memory card reader for your computer. The screen on the 'M' model is handy for photo selection but the screen resolution could be better. One point though. Having migrated from an HP printer I've used a large amount of HP premium photo paper with this Epson and although it was tough dry pretty quickly it needed nearly 48 hours before it was dry enough to go in a photo album. (Guess i shouldn't mix brands!)

Image quality CD Printing Works well without a computer Separate carts for all 6 inks Optional bluetooth for wireless printing

None

HP

not used

After spending $229 for this printer I found out that this is primarily a 'Photo' printer that can also be used for most -- but not all general computer printing. That is an important fact (to me anyway) which I haven't seen mentioned in the reviews I have seen on this printer. The R300 does an excellent job of printing photos. It also does a good job of printing text in a slow 'quality' mode. However, it does a very poor job of printing 'draft' text for purposes of reviewing draft reports, etc. prior to the 'final' copy. Any of the 'higher-speed' printing modes quoted for this printer are only useable for confirming the layout of a photo/doucument -- the words/images on the paper are too faint to be able to be read easily. The Epson help-desk calls this the 'economy' mode and is for saving ink. They also indicated to me that it is primarily for confirming a photo layout before printing it in high resolution. They said that there was no way to change the printer settings to make the higher speed printing useable for printing many-paged word processing documents (like I was used to with all of my previous Hewlett-Packard printers which had a 'draft' mode that printed quickly and was almost as good a quality as the 'normal' mode. Thus the 15-17 pages/minute high speed printing specifications you see for this printer are actually only good for layout review. The actual printing of useable text documents is in the 6-8 pages/minute. So if you have a need to do a lot of word-processing type printing, I would look elsewhere.

Excellent quality photo prinintg.

Lack of a true 'draft' mode for printing out text based documents for editing and review.

HP 932C, HP722, HP500

Epson was quick to answer my telephone call and email. Although they were unable to assist me other than to tell me this is a photo printer -- not a general purpose printer.

This printer is truly amazing. I started by checking every review I could find. Most were good so I decided to buy the R300M. It must be really popular because I couldn't find it anywhere. Every online and regular retail store I checked was out of stock. I finally found a few R300 printers (the one without the built in monitor) at Staples so I ran out and bought it immediately. I was looking for 2 things: getting 4x6 photos that were as good as commercial photo lab quality prints and having the ability to print 5x7 and 8x10 enlargements of my favorite pictures. I was stunned by the first picture I printed. It has so many features like cropping, zooming, and brightness (just to name a few) that I never hooked it up to a computer. I was able to just plug my memory card in and print. I can't believe the printer cost is so low. I was expecting to spend at least $400 to get the quality I wanted and I got so much for under $200. The printer definitely works best on the Premium Glossy Borderless paper which also has the big benefit of not requiring trimming. I printed a few pictures on 8x10 paper (also Premium Glossy Borderless) and the result was truly spectacular. I've showed my printed photos to everyone who will look and they can't believe I printed them myself. I'm going to spend a fortune on frames because now getting a picture enlarged will be far too easy! Thanks to all of the people who reviewed this printer before me - you guys gave great advice on papers and settings to use which spared me from going through a lot of trial and error.

All of the popular settings are in the printer so you don't need to hook up to a computer. The output is really clear. The color seems to be pretty true-to-life when you use the Epson Premium Glossy paper. I tried the regular glossy but the colors looked dull and I had to trim the photos. Borderless printing. Memory card slots are on the front.

Epson Premium Glossy Borderless paper is hard to find in retail stores. Most of the stores I went to had 4x6, some had 8x10 but nobody had 5x7. I managed to find 5x7 on the internet. 5 ink cartridges at 12.99 each, one at 17.00 - do the math. I printed about 170 4x6 photos taken on an island in the Carribean and ran out of light cyan and light magenta around the 120th print.

None

Haven't needed it yet.