Epson Stylus Photo R800

The Epson R800 should feature on the 'consider' list of anyone looking for an inkjet printer for high quality photo printing.

At full print resolution and on premium photo paper, the results from this printer are excellent - comparable in many cases to digital prints from the high-street kiosks.

Colour prints are especially impressive. Monochrome prints, thanks to the two black ink cartridges, are also very good, although a little more effort in terms of fine tuning the pre-sets is required to make the most of printing in black and white.

The lack of a built in flash card reader may be a drawback for some, but I suspect that if you are looking to spend £200 + on a printer you will probably also be tweaking and editing your photographs in Photoshop or similar before printing.

Ink, at nearly £100 for a full replacement set of genuine Epson cartridges, has the potential to hit your wallet hard, although ink usage is not excessive and the wide availability of 3rd party inks means that it is possible to more than halve this cost.

Long print life is promised - Epson claim that their Durabrite inks printed onto matching paper will give prints with upto 70 years of fade resistance. Bare in mind that third party inks and papers are likely to fade more rapidly.

Print speed, by no means unacceptable, falls some way short of Epson's claims on the unit that I am using. I may just have a slow example, but I suspect that Epson's claims are a little optimistic.

In summary, this is a printer capable of producing some stunning results, especially with some fine tuning of the colour control settings, that should meet the needs of most digital photography enthusiasts.