Epson Stylus Photo 1400 review

Epson's Stylus Photo 1400 won our Best Buy award last year, thanks to its low price and excellent photo quality. It takes the same six cartridges as Epson's R285 and R360. Like the R285, we had problems with the default colour profile.

Despite its strong performance last year, it doesn't stand up too well against the latest A3 photo printers. The 6x4in photos looked great once we adjusted our colour profiles. Dark colours were deep and intense, shading was smooth, and natural tones were lifelike. The photos looked similar to those produced by Epson's R360, although we preferred the 1400's rendering of low-contrast shots.

A4 prints were of similarly high quality, but A3 photo quality wasn't up to that of the other printers here. Our maximum-quality colour A3 print emerged in a slow nine minutes and 46 seconds, and our black-and-white test print took just 30 seconds less. Black-and-white photos looked great, with no trace of grain, although some fine details reproduced by the other A3+ printers were lost by the 1400. There was also visible banding on shaded areas.

Colour A3 prints weren't as good. The loss of fine detail was more obvious in colour. The tiny dots that made up the image were visible and yellow tones were too intense, even after we adjusted our colour profiles. Colours were slightly oversaturated and pale shades were too dark. We calculated the price of an A3 colour photo at £1.86 including paper, which is the highest of the A3 printers.

Standard A4 document printing is unlikely to be a priority if you're buying an A3+ printer, which is a good thing in this case. A standard A4 page is a rather costly 7.8p per page. Normal-quality text prints were passable, despite jagged edges on the lettering, but printed at a slow 2.6ppm. Draft prints were faster at 9.1ppm, but were readable rather than presentable.

The Stylus Photo 1400 is fair value and produced reasonable photos, but its flawed colour settings are annoying. We preferred the image quality of the pricier A3+ printers here.