Epson C86 Photo Edition review

Whether you're a budding David Bailey who's keen to see your photographs printed at the highest quality, or the person who puts together the church newsletter, a well-chosen printer will make the crucial difference to your project.

But don't worry if your money tree is wilting: quality needn't cost you the earth. For instance, our long-standing Top 50 Best Buy, HP's Deskjet 5150, costs a mere £70 including VAT. But now the HP has competition: Epson has confidently stepped into the ring with its new Stylus C86 Photo Edition printer.

Lifting the C86 out of its box offered a pleasant surprise: Epson has bundled a USB memory card reader with its printer - very handy for digital photographers. It's a shame that, just like many other printers (including our Top 50 winner, the HP Deskjet 5150), the C86 Photo doesn't come with a USB or parallel printer cable. That could cost you as much as another tenner. Once we'd located a suitable USB cable, installation was quick and straightforward.

With the C86 set to 'draft' print quality, the Epson managed to churn out six pages per minute in our first test, printing a plain text document on standard inkjet paper. Impressively quick - but sadly, quality was pretty dire. Text came out a faded, spidery grey rather than a crisp black. Upping the C86 to normal quality produced much better results, with text coming out solid black. At this setting, the Epson managed to keep up an impressive rate of 3.5 pages per minute, but prints weren't up to the high standard set by the HP Deskjet 5150.

The C86 acquitted itself far better when printing pictures on standard paper. A newsletter with a combination of pictures and text was reproduced beautifully, with hardly a sign of graininess or colour banding anywhere to be seen. Colour was a little over-saturated and the text a touch spidery, but overall the Epson's results were very impressive.

The final hurdle was our photo test. We set the C86 to its highest quality setting, loaded up a sheet of glossy photo paper and waited a lengthy 6 minutes and 53 seconds for the results. Not only was the Epson disappointingly sluggish, it also made our test photo taken in broad daylight look like it was taken at sunset! Detail in the dark areas of the picture was also poor.

Epson's C86 is a good printer. But the HP Deskjet 5150 is faster, cheaper and produces better-quality prints.