Epson Stylus Photo R200 review

If we'd held a catwalk competition this month, the R200 would win hands down. For a budget printer, the R200 looks fantastic thanks to its solid build, and stylish silver and translucent black case.

In our tests, the Epson didn't get off to a great start. Standard text looked acceptable, but under closer inspection, larger text suffered from obvious bands running through the letters. Normal-sized fonts were also a little blocky and spidery around the edges and text was often uneven, rather than a clean, solid black, because too much ink had been absorbed into the paper. For everyday jobs - printing from Web pages, for example - this won't be a problem. If you're printing your CV or a formal letter, though, you'll want it to look the best it possibly can.

Things are made worse by the print speed which, at 1.8 pages per minute for standard text, is painfully slow. This rose to a decent enough 6 pages per minute in draft mode, but the text was very obviously banded, looking almost like something from an old dot matrix printer.

When we added graphics to the equation (staying with plain paper and default print settings) close up, pictures looked really fuzzy. While uniform areas of colour weren't poorly reproduced, they did display a faint banding and graininess on closer inspection. All edges, including those of the text, were fuzzy too.

Things improved when we printed our newsletter using the printer's best settings on coated paper. Text was crisper and so were the pictures, although many words were surrounded by odd wayward specs of black ink - especially when we printed large fonts - which produced messy-looking results. When examined closely, areas of uniform colour also suffered from a slight banding.

The R200 really came into its own when printing our A4 photo. Flesh tones were accurate, and virtually all the detail was present - including almost every strand of our model's hair - even in dark areas. If we were being ultra-picky, very slight banding and grain could be identified with effort, but otherwise the prints were fine. A print time of just 4 minutes and 14 seconds was also impressive.

Another great feature of the R200 is that it prints on CDs and DVDs. Epson even bundles a program to help you create your own disc designs, although printing is only possible on specially designed discs.

One final small, but important gripe, is that Epson doesn't provide a USB cable. These cost around fifteen quid, so this isn't just a trifling extra cost.

Overall, this printer is great at printing photos, but for everything else, particularly text, it's outclassed by its competitors.