Epson Stylus Photo R340 review

Compact 6x4" photo printers are currently outselling more conventional models, but a full-size printer has several advantages over its smaller cousins.

Epson's Stylus Photo R340, for example, can print on A4 paper or suitably coated optical discs that are just too big to fit in a compact device.

Most compact photo inkjets don't have room for more than the cyan, magenta and yellow inks necessary for full-colour printing, but the R340 prints with six colours in six separate tanks. This can make it a little harder to keep track of ink levels, but it means that you never need to throw away unused ink in a tri-colour cartridge.

Printing with six inks can produce photos with less grain than a four-ink print, particularly with an inkjet that places ink on the page in small droplets. The R340's minimum droplet size of three picolitres is pretty small, and helps it produce photos with virtually no grain.

The R340 can make prints directly from almost any type of memory card or from a PictBridge digital camera. Memory cards can even be backed up on supported Zip drives or external CD writers connected to the printer's PictBridge port. A built-in 61mm screen previews the contents of an inserted card. There are several basic editing options, including adjustment of sharpness and contrast, but Epson's direct printing menu isn't the most intuitive we've seen.

The R340 is much slower than many other photo printers we've tested. Printing six borderless 6x4" photos took 22-and-a-half minutes, which is nearly twice the speed of HP's Photosmart 8250. Fortunately, the results were superb, with bold, accurate colours and no trace of any grain.

On plain paper the R340 is similarly slow and, like many Epson inkjets we've tested, its draft output is faint and blocky. We ran our 50-page draft text test at the printer's Text setting. It completed the job at a limp 2.6 pages ppm. The Photosmart 8250 managed the same test at 18.5ppm and produced better text.

The R340 takes its time, but it produces superb photos. It's a great-value printer if photo quality is paramount, but the Photosmart 8250 is a much better all-rounder, and its photo quality is nearly as good.