Epson Stylus Color 500 review

At first sight, the new Epson Stylus Color 500 looks virtually identical to its predecessor, the Stylus Color II.

Clearly, the basic mechanism hasn't changed. But significant gains to the performance of an inkjet printer can be brought about by altering subtle aspects such as the print head, the ink formulation and the firmware - and these are exactly the sort of changes which Epson professes to have made. In particular, the Stylus Color 500 claims a better ink formulation for improved performance on plain paper, colour matching to ensure accurate reproduction, and a bundled graphics package, Sierra's Print Artist, included in a lower price.

So, enough on the differences from the Stylus Color II. How did we get on with the Stylus Color 500? First of all, the installation. From the point we lifted the printer out of its box, it took about 10 minutes to produce our first page. Physical installation involved nothing more than removing the various pieces of packing material and the print head clamp, connecting the machine to the PC and attaching the mains supply lead. Software installation was equally uneventful. It's worth noting that, in addition to the conventional bi-directional parallel port and Windows drivers, the printer also has an Apple Macintosh printer port and appropriate driver software, though, this being a PC magazine, we didn't test the Epson using these options.

Once you've installed the driver, the Stylus Color 500 is automatically selected as the default Windows printer. So all you have to do is click on the Print button in any Windows package and the Stylus Color 500 will burst into life. In fact, you'll find there are quite a number of parameters which you can alter in the Printer Options dialog box, but unless you're changing the paper type you can usually accept its default settings.

The first pages we printed were black-and-white Microsoft Word documents. While the text on plain paper wasn't as crisp as you'd get from a 600dpi laser, or even a good 300dpi model, the Epson's 720x720dpi resolution is better than most inkjets and it showed. The black was dense and pure, qualities maintained in colour output since, unlike many budget inkjets, the Stylus Color 500 uses black and colour cartridges simultaneously. Our only real gripe about the Stylus emerged here, however: the documents' footers failed to print due to the 500's rather large non-printing area at the bottom of the page.

Line art with areas of solid colour is another good test for an inkjet. This is the way to reveal banding - a major bugbear of some models. On our first print, banding was visible, though it then disappeared. Apparently this was an artefact of the software driver's intelligent mode selection: if you choose Microweave, banding is eliminated, at the cost of slightly slower printing.

Printing photographs is probably the best test of Epson's claim of improved colour density on ordinary paper, and full-page colour photos on standard copier paper came out very well. You still get an improvement if you use the special coated paper, but it's now debatable whether it's worth the extra money. If you really want to push the boat out you can use high-gloss paper, for results approaching photographic print quality at a glance.

All in all, if you accept the inherent drawbacks of all inkjets (including slowness) the Epson is as good a deal as you'll find.