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| Issue 3: Epson Stylus Photo 700 Review | |||||||||||
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| Mick Sutton finds the perfect companion for his digital camera. |
The quality and speed of modern day inkjet printers is improving all the time. While the prices are still falling, I decided it was time to upgrade from my existing Canon BJC 600 that had served me well for four years, but could not match the latest generation of injets available.
In the past, Amiga owners were very limited to which printers they could use with their machines due to the lack of available drivers, and the limited workbench printer driver system (only capable of outputting up to 4,096 colours or 16 shades of grey). But that changed with the introduction of 3rd party printing packages such as Studio (current version 2.20) and Turboprint (current version 7). I have Turboprint which not only provides drivers for a wide range of modern printers but also replaces the printer device with one that supports 24 bit printing. Several of my friends at work own Epson Stylus Photo 700 printers and the print quality I have seen is outstanding, particularly photographic images. After deciding that this was the printer I wanted, and checking on the Isreesoft website that Turboprint supported it, I shopped around for a good price.
I saw the printer advertised on the Simply Computers website for �156 and as they were just around the corner from where I work, the deal was done.
The printer has a built in sheet feeder which can take a stack of A4 paper. The paper is fed through the printer from the sheet feeder at the back onto a tray at the front at an angle of about 135 degrees, ie quite flat and therefore tends not to curl the paper and allows feeding of heavier paper/card. Due to the mechanical layout of the printer it has quite a small footprint which I measured to be 43cm x 25cm with the paper tray folded away. Installation of the printer entails finding a space to locate it, a power socket nearby, and a centronics parallel cable to connect it to your Amiga.
Epson have made this printer very user friendly, it indicates when ink levels in the cartridges are getting low (about 5 full A4 pages to go) with a flashing LED. In fact there are only three buttons on the printer, power, page feed and head cleaning (held down for 3 seconds to replace cartridge).
As I said earlier, I have Turboprint so it was time to pick the appropriate driver from within the Turboprefs program, this provides a good set of defaults for high quality printing, so good in fact that I have not changed many settings.
With the right driver chosen it was time to try printing something, I selected a scanned photo of my daughter and loaded it into Graphics Publisher. I then chose the 720 x 720 DPI resolution with the Photo enhance option selected.
Printing speed is quite impressive, I printed the picture on 720 DPI Inkjet paper (A4) in about 6 minutes and the quality was astounding with hardly any sign of dithering whatsoever, in fact even at this resolution (maximum resolution is 1440 x 720) printing to photo glossy paper, you have to look very hard to see the difference between a print and an original photograph.
This quality is achieved by a combination of high resolution and five colour inks compared to the normal three found in most inkjets. The extra colours reduce the amount of dithering required, particularly in light shaded areas such as skin tones and skies. The final print has no sign of banding whatsoever and this is due to the microweave system employed.
Good results are obtainable from all good quality paper, but for better results I found Epson 720 dpi paper gave good sharp images showing vibrant colours and because it is coated absorbs less ink, but for ultimate quality you can use Photo Glossy paper which produces astounding output very close to a real photo.
The price of the Photo 700 is comparable to many 3 colour inkjets, but there is no comparison with photo quality this printer is streets ahead.
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Pros
Excellent photo quality |
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