Epson Stylus Photo R800 review

Normal inkjets use a black ink plus cyan, magenta and yellow to create a range of colours.

By interspersing dots of different colours, they can fool the eye into seeing millions of different shades and hues. Paler shades are difficult to reproduce, as the dots must be more widely spaced - making it easier to distinguish each dot.

High-quality six-ink printers solve this problem by drawing lighter regions of a picture using paler versions of the cyan and magenta inks. These extra two colours reduce the appearance of grain and help produce excellent photographs, but their quality still doesn't match professional laboratory prints.

Epson's Stylus Photo R800 adds two more inks - red and blue - and where most photo printers use dye-based inks, the R800 uses pigments. These produce longer-lasting prints, but they normally can't match the high gloss finish of dye inks. Epson has solved this by adding a 'gloss-optimiser' cartridge; essentially a varnish.

The R800's ink droplets are so tiny that it doesn't need light cyan and magenta inks to reduce grain. Instead, it uses blue and red inks that help to increase the range and realism of the colours it can reproduce.

On gloss and semi-gloss papers, the R800 delivers vibrant prints with plenty of contrast and highly realistic colours. Blues in particular are noticeably punchier than on a six-ink system, and grain is invisible to the naked eye.

The Epson's best print quality takes time, though. It took 5 minutes and 21 seconds to print our A4 photo - slower than HP's Photosmart 8450 and far behind Canon's PIXMA iP8500. Furthermore, the HP has memory card slots and a display, and both it and the PIXMA support the PictBridge standard. The R800 can only print from a host computer.

The R800 is an excellent printer, but it's expensive when compared to the best six-ink devices. Only serious photographers are likely to appreciate the higher photo quality, and many of them will be prepared to spend more for an A3 printer.