epson stylus photo r340 printer

Author's product rating:   

Picture quality	Excellent
Printing speed	Very fast
Colour sensitivity	Excellent
Ease of use	Very easy
Value For Money	Good

Advantages:	awesome speed, very low noise, excellent print quality
Disadvantages:	cost of original epson inks

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

As always, a lot of time was spent looking at all the available products.
Our last printer (which has been passed on to a family member) was an EPSON 680, which when bought was a good mix of speed and resolution. but quite noisy
The new printer we have is the EPSON R340.
WOW!
At first I didnt think it was working, it was so quiet !
Then I thought it had a problem because it couldnt have done all the pages so quickly, but it had !

The printer resolution is 5760 x 1440 and uses varying sized droplets of ink, making fade to white on a photo invisible to the naked eye (the printer also uses 6 inks in seperate cartriges to acheive this)

The printer prints edge to edge, top to bottom, and I havn't seen any extra ink inside the printer when doing this.

The R340 is very well built, there is a nice solid feel to it that the 680 totally lacked, and it dosnt mind large quantities of paper in the feeder (we have put over 100 sheets in at a time)

There is a nice colour screen built into the printer, which allows you to print from memory cards (plugged into built in slots) and direct connection to most digital cameras, without even using a PC (or mac if you are that way inclined) You can adjust colour, brightness etc, zoom, crop and do some special effects all on the printer itself using easily understood menus, with WYSIWYG display

One feature I wanted was the ability to print directly onto blank CD-R and DVD media, which this printer does admirably using a plastic tray/caddy, and software included has a cd print creator that is both easy to use and powerful.

The printer comes with an easy install sheet, which worked flawlessly with XP pro. printer was installed and working in a couple of minutes (it also gives the option to check the web for updates). A handy feature of the install, was to have the drivers for other operating systems held on the main PC if the printer was to be used on a network (which we do using win98, win98se and win2000) All the other computers installed the drivers over the network with no problems at all.

The only bad points with the printer I have found after 3 months, and about 600 sheets of printing are : The price of original inks is extortionate (luckily there are many companies making replacements for 1/10 the price).
But the ink cartriges last a lot longer than our previous printer.

And the screen used to set up the printer, and preview photo's etc without a PC stays on the insert media wizard once it has been used

I havnt done a daylight fade comparison yet, (I know that epson inks are the best on the market for not fading, even in direct sunlight, unlike the other top 3 makes) but I am using after market inks, picked up on ebay for less than a pound each, but I can say the ones i bought (pro-jet) have no discernable colour difference. so I havnt had to use the colour adjust feature built in to the epson drivers

I can't say much about the support, except that drivers are easily obtained from the internet, because i havn't had any problems with it. but i give epson a good for support on experience.

I have experience with a lot of printers, and am very happy with my choice.