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  Epson Stylus Photo 1290

  Jaison Lewis, Sep 04, 2002 0000 hrs IST

  The ideal printer for hi-quality large format printing

  Affordable consumables, extremely high-quality output

  Not very fast, poor text printing quality in 'normal' mode

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Though HP is the market leader in professional inkjet printer sales, they have, in the Stylus Photo 1290, a serious challenger from Epson. This printer produces sharper prints than any existing HP printer, which it achieves using variable-sized droplets and the Piezo Electric technology-based print head. It also uses a six-colour print process instead of the usual four-colour process. There are two extra colours, light Cyan and light Magenta, which are meant to provide smoother colour gradation, and more vibrant saturation which is true to the original colours of a photo/document. The printer can use both USB and the parallel port to connect to a PC, supports printing up to 2880 DPI and can print on a paper size of up to A3 - full bleed, and without any borders whatsoever. Like with all Epson printers, the cartridges are cheap - the colour cartridge costs Rs.920 and the black cost Rs.790.

Hassle-free performance

The printer got installed without any hassle, and was immediately detected by Windows XP, without the OS even asking for the drivers CD. (Later on, we did install the latest drivers and utilities from the Epson Website before conducting our tests.)

The first test was to demonstrate resolution and sharpness, using a high-resolution vector test pattern. The printer reproduced excellent sharpness and detail in this test, and was able to remain sharp and accurate for up to 900DPI or more, which is quite good! The colour quality and sharpness was also seen in the photo and multi-pattern picture test, proving that the six-colour process is certainly better than the four-colour process, and gives a more true-to-life picture with richer skin tones, and true gloss impressions.

The text print test further proved the sharpness by producing readable text at even one point size (that's 0.3millimetre height for a line of text, unreadable to the human eye, but visible clearly with a microscope at 50x magnification). The printer was not very fast though, and printed at a rather slow pace of 2.4PPM (Pages Per Minute) in our 20-page text test, at 'normal' print quality. Also, text print quality was quite poor in 'normal' or 'economy' mode.
The Epson Stylus Photo 1290 prints sharp and very good quality colour images using its 6-colour cartridge, and these cartridges are very affordable when compared with the ones in the same range, from HP. There are a few issues like the poor quality of text printing in normal mode, but this isn't much of an issue as professional printers as this one are hardly meant for printing text in economy modes!

The printer isn't too fast, so those looking for hi-speed printing might want to look elsewhere, but those who want extremely hi-quality (yet reasonably affordable) large format A3 printing, should definitely look at the Stylus Photo 1290. At Rs.35000, the price is a little steep, but the quality you get more than compensates for it.

Test Unit Sourced From: Epson India Ltd.

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