Epson R300 review

If you're sick of traipsing down to the chemist to get your digital snaps printed, you need a photo printer.

As well as being able to turn out digital snaps at photo quality, the Epson R300 offers a few fancy functions, including the option to print directly from your camera's memory card. You can even perform basic image-editing functions on the printer itself, including red-eye reduction. These aren't as sophisticated as those offered by a 'proper' image-editing package, but they do a fair job.

All these functions can be previewed using the printer's 2.5in colour TFT display. There's also an LCD status window that displays information about the image, as well as such options as direct print settings.

The R300 isn't lightning-quick, to say the least. It took two minutes for a single borderless 6x4in photo to print - that's only half as fast as our current Top 50 Best Buy printer, the Canon i865. Printing an A4 photo took just under five minutes, which is twice as long as the Canon. Image quality, though, was top-notch. We were impressed by the natural skin tones, an impressively sharp level of detail and well-balanced colours. We needed to look very closely before we could see any banding (in which horizontal stripes appear in areas of heavier colour).

Sadly, text output was less impressive. In Draft mode, the R300 only managed nine pages a minute, which is well under the 15 pages a minute that Epson quotes. Characters were faint, and - because the ink bled slightly into the page - ill-defined, making them difficult to read. In Standard mode, R300's page rate fell to a painfully slow two pages a minute, and quality was still well below par. With spidery letters, and a rather non-committal shade of black that ended up more of a muddy grey, we were disappointed.

The R300 produces great photo prints, but that alone isn't enough to earn it an award. Our current Top 50 Best Buy winner, Canon's i865, tops it for both print speed and text quality. If you're after a new photo inkjet, go for the Canon Bubblejet i865.