Epson Stylus D88 Photo Edition review

Gallery

Verdict:

The D88 produces decent print quality and is reasonably priced. It's a competent printer, but it isn't as fast or as cheap to run as HP's DeskJet 5940.

Review Date: 20 Oct 2005

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Our Rating 3 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

Like the Stylus D68 reviewed on the previous page, Epson's Stylus D88 is a direct replacement for an existing model.

There's little difference between the specification of this printer and the Stylus C86 that it succeeds, however. Like the D68, the Stylus D88 uses the new DURABrite Ultra pigment inks. It uses the same manual head alignment routine as the D68, but is otherwise simple to set up.

Both the new Epson printers reviewed in this test use a separate ink cartridge for each colour, rather than the two-cartridge system used by HP and two of the Canon inkjets. Epson's approach can help reduce print costs, as you never need throw away unused ink. However, although both Epson inkjets have low mono running costs, neither is especially affordable in colour.

Like many of the printers on test, Epson's cartridges were so new that they weren't widely available at the time we went to press. We'd expect to see a small decrease in prices over the next few months.

We expect any printer to produce legible text at any quality setting. Draft text from the D88 is a big improvement over that from the D68, so we were able to run our 50-page document test at its fastest setting. This produced a rapid result, but as the D88's sturdy output tray has no lip to retain printed paper, pages spilled on to the desk and lost their order.

At higher-quality settings the D88 is too slow for this to be a problem, and its plain paper print quality is among the best here. Colour graphics benefit from solid-looking colours and text is dark black.

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