StylusPhoto 1200 review

Although Epson practically owns the Mac market for desktop and large-format inkjets, the company continues to innovate.

The two printers reviewed here are firmly in the middle ground of Epson's range. The StylusColor 900 is the replacement for the venerable StylusColor 850, a solid A4 performer intended for general home, light graphics and office use, while the StylusPhoto 1200 replaces the much more adventurous StylusPhoto EX, an A3, six-colour photo printer. However, the term 'photo' shouldn't lead you into thinking that it's only good for graphics work.

Epson's Advanced MicroPiezo system used in the StylusColor 900 and StylusPhoto 1200 uses a minute electric current to drive an oscillating quartz crystal, which then acts as a miniature pump, propelling the ink droplets onto the paper. The advantage of this system is greater control and less splattering, which is why Epson was able to offer such high dpi levels (around 1440) long before any of its competitors. Finer dpi resolutions mean better gradations between tones, with reduced banding. The 'Advanced' refers to the fact that these printers now come with variable-size droplet technology. This allows for much finer dithering of the inks to produce intermediate tones, while the printer driver can turn up the dot size for increased speed in areas of more continuous tone.

The StylusColor 900 is a radical departure from the 850 in terms of styling and industrial design. It's rounder and considerably larger, although it's still only an A4 printer. The 900, like the 1200, is also supplied without a serial cable for attaching it to your Mac's printer port. Also around the back of the 900 is a PC-type Centronics parallel port. Epson printers have always allowed you to share them between a PC and a Mac at the same time, with the printer itself detecting which source its input is coming from. Most importantly of all, there's also a USB port, so the 900 can plug straight into the iMac and the new G3s. When these printers can dispense with the serial and parallel ports and standardise on USB, prices will fall further. A 900N version with a 10/100Base-T Ethernet card is also available.

The StylusColor takes the standard Epson three-in-one CMY (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow) ink cartridges, and one separate K (Black) cartridge. Separating the black cartridge is necessary since it tends to run out more quickly, especially on text-heavy documents. The specs for the StylusPhoto 1200 are identical except that it takes up to A3 paper size and also uses a six-colour printing system - the colour cartridge has extra light Cyan and light Magenta cartridges. The logic here is that the extra colours reduce further the need to dither dots of CM and Y to produce intermediate hues, thus resulting in a more continuous-tone image.

Epson claims the 900 is the fastest inkjet in the world - this is difficult to test on the Mac since there are so few other systems to compare it with, but it's certainly faster than the 850, by around 10% in our tests. An A4 print of a 24Mb full-colour Photoshop RGB TIFF printed out in a shade less than 10 minutes at 1440dpi - not bad, considering it was full coverage. The same document printed out at 720dpi in a few seconds over half the time. Epson's stated figures of 12ppm (pages per minute) for monochrome and 11.7ppm for colour should be taken with a pinch of salt, since they relate to plain black text and coloured text, respectively.

Quality was extremely high. On the 1440dpi setting, reproduction was near photographic, and the variable-size dot technology seems to clean up in areas of fine detail or low contrast. Colours were rich and vibrant, with Epson's unerring ability to get a damn good colour match straight from the box on standard settings. It should be noted that printing from a CMYK document in Photoshop can produce odd colour imbalances unless you use the intermediary of a software PostScript interpreter.