Epson Stylus Photo RX685 review

If you're interested in photo printing and graphics, Epson's Stylus Photo RX685 is built for the job.

Combining a printer and a scanner, it's one of the largest consumer all-in-one devices we've seen. Its large 2.5 inch colour display makes it easy to print photos from memory cards, and a PictBridge port allows direct printing from digital cameras.

The scanning resolution of 1200x2400dpi isn't high by today's standards, but sufficient unless you need to blow up tiny originals. It produced clear, sharp and consistently coloured images.

The printer uses six inks, including light cyan and light magenta, to create beautifully smooth, subtly shaded photos. Our initial prints, however, suffered from oversaturated red tones, making skin look flushed and unnatural. We were able to correct this in the printer driver's colour control settings by disabling ICM colour adjustment. This was annoying, but didn't present any further problems. Photos, although fairly slow at nearly two minutes each, were among the best we've seen from a home printer, with perfectly realistic colours, sharp detail, and no trace of graininess.

Document prints and photocopies were generally good. We had to perform a manual print head alignment to eliminate horizontal banding, which required us to select the best of several printed blocks. Once this was complete, our mixed colour text and graphics prints were accurate and quick, although combined print costs of 7.53p are very high and blocks of solid colour suffered from slight speckling. Correspondence quality text was pin-sharp, and legible draft text was printed very fast.

This RX685's biggest problem is its price. For £166, we'd have hoped to see the optional duplex and Bluetooth functions included. Unless you really need the scanner/copier element, Epson's Stylus Photo R360 (search for 147855) is better value. There are also great general purpose all-in-ones at lower prices: look out for our group test next month.