Epson Stylus Photo R1800 review

Many of Epson's A3 printers have found a

home with enthusiast and professional photographers, and its Stylus Photo R1800 is set to continue this trend. It has a minimum ink droplet size of 1.5 picolitres, a resolution of 5,760x1,440dpi and can print on paper up to A3+ (297x420mm) in size.

The R1800 uses the same UltraChrome Hi-Gloss pigment inks as the R800 A4 printer, which was reviewed in Labs, Shopper June 2004. It's an unusual arrangement, as there are no light cyan and magenta inks, often used to reduce grain in light areas of a photo. Instead, Epson supplements the printer's cyan, magenta and yellow with red and blue inks to increase its colour gamut. There are two black cartridges that contain matte and photo black inks.

We often find that pigment inks won't produce a high-gloss finish, but Epson has solved this with its gloss optimiser cartridge. This is automatically applied by the printer to produce an even finish that's suited to the paper type in use. In practice, it produces smooth results that look just as good as those from dye inks.

This leaves photographers free to enjoy the long fade resistance of pigment inks. Epson claims that gloss prints from the R1800 will be lightfast for over 80 years. By contrast, Canon claims only 25 years for the dye-based prints from its BubbleJet i9950 (What's New, Shopper November 2004). The archival quality of the R1800's prints makes them more suitable for gallery display and sales.

There would be no point in keeping inferior prints for all this time, so it's heartening to see that the R1800 produces exceptional results. Even the best inkjets normally show a little grain on the blue sky of our barn test photo, but the R1800 didn't, even without a light-cyan ink. Prints that we made from high-resolution test photos had vibrant yet faithful colours. Blues in particular were powerful and rich.

When we tested Canon's Bubblejet i9950, we weren't entirely happy with the intensity of its dark colours on glossy papers. On both Epson and Canon papers, the R1800 printer produced deeper shades that helped it to print with higher levels of contrast and detail.

Though prints from the more expensive Canon seem marginally sharper, overall we preferred the Epson's output. The R1800 is slower at its highest quality settings, taking around 12 minutes for each borderless A3+ print, but it's time well spent when the excellent results will last so long.