Epson Stylus Photo R240 review

The R240 is Epson's new budget inkjet printer. It only prints with four inks, rather than the six used by high-end photo-printers, but has lots of other tricks and gadgets up its sleeve.

The printer has a built-in memory card reader that supports most digital card formats, including CompactFlash, SD and xD. On the front of the R240 is a 1.5in TFT screen and a control panel that allows you to browse the photos on your memory cards, and choose which to print. The screen's a bit small though, making it difficult to pick out details. Fortunately, there's a USB port on the front that can be used to connect to a PictBridge-compatible digital camera, so you can print photos using the camera's controls. If your camera has a large display it's worth using PictBridge.

Epson has tried to keep running costs down by supplying each colour in its own separate ink tank. This means you won't have to chuck out a four-in-one cartridge that's only run out of one colour. Sadly, however, the cartridges print a relatively small number of pages. This bumps running costs right back up again to 7p per photo - 2.4p more expensive than our Best Buy four-colour budget inkjet, the Canon Pixma iP3000.

The Epson's print quality was good; in photos, colours were vibrant and skin tones were true to life. Detail was exquisite and you could only see the grain if you looked at an image very closely. Text was sharp and black, with clean edges. Overall, it compared well to the Canon.

Unfortunately, speed wasn't the R240's strong point. Printing at Normal quality, we saw our five-page text document print in two minutes and ten seconds. The iP3000 was twice as fast, but the Epson's text was as sharp and almost as black. The R240 took six minutes and 19 seconds to print our high-resolution A4 picture, which was over a minute quicker than the Canon.

The Epson prints lovely looking photos, but it's not that fast and it's expensive to run - which is why we're still recommending the Canon