Product Reviews

These days it seems as if barely a month goes by without a new bells-and-whistles inkjet printer appearing on the scene. In recent times it's been particularly frenzied, what with the arrival of the Epson Stylus Color 740 (reviewed issue 50, p171), which was followed closely by HP's DeskJet 880C (reviewed issue 53, p164). Not to be outdone, Epson has launched yet another printer, the Stylus Photo 750.

You could be forgiven for wondering what on earth was going on, and whether or not it is possible to improve on what is already an A List product, given the short period of time between their releases. But improve it has and the new 750, like the 740 before it, scores some notable wins over its main rival.

Hewlett-Packard has long touted its PhotoREt system as the superior alternative to the incredibly high resolutions achieved with Epson's and Lexmark's printers. Although HP's inkjet printers have traditionally only been able to reach resolutions of 600 « 600dpi (as opposed to the 750's 1,440 « 720dpi, for instance), the company says that by producing smaller dots and varying colour intensities by firing more ink drops per dot, a more subtle effect can be achieved than by merely upping the resolution.

Unfortunately, with the advent of Epson's recent printers, HP can no longer hold this up as an advantage. According to the specification, the Photo 750 can produce ink drops as small as six picolitres in volume (45 micrometres in diameter) compared to the 880C's eight picolitres. It can vary the size of its dots, boasts six-colour instead of four-colour printing and, of course, has the advantage of a high 1,440 « 720dpi resolution.

Technical details aside though, there's nothing very remarkable about the 750. It doesn't deviate from the Epson design template in appearance: the automatic sheet feeder protrudes at an angle from the rear of the printer, and the output tray folds down and pulls out in stages. It isn't particularly attractive to look at and, with the output tray fully extended, it also occupies a fair amount of desk space (609mm from back to front),

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but at least it feels solidly built.

Thanks to the popularity of Apple's iMac (reviewed issue 50, p150), USB connections have been appearing with increasing regularity on printers, and the 750 is no exception. Quite why you'd want to use USB instead of the standard parallel port connection I'm not sure, especially when there's no performance enhancement to be gained; nor was its major advantage - ease of setup - evident in the driver software we received. Unless your parallel port is already occupied by an essential peripheral, you'd be better off sticking with the parallel connection and saving your USB sockets for peripherals such as Iomega's USB Zip drive (reviewed issue 53, p173), where you'll see a definite improvement in performance.

Once it's ready to go, it's a familiar story in the performance stakes. First, it's clear that the 750's extra two colours have a negative effect on overall print speed. The 750 took 13 minutes and 55 seconds to print an A4-sized glossy print, which is considerably slower than the 740's 12 minutes. It also proved sluggish in our 25-page raw text test, producing a rate of just 1.9ppm at 360dpi compared to the Epson 740's 3.2ppm; this was followed by a disappointing 4.3ppm in draft mode - a far cry from the claimed maximum of 6ppm. This is one area where HP's printers still hold the advantage: the 880C printed the A4 photo in just over ten minutes, and the text test at a rate of 3.9ppm in standard quality mode.

It should come as no surprise to find that in terms of overall print quality, the 750 is superior to HP's offering. What's more difficult to discern, however, is whether or not there's any difference between the output of the 750 and the 740. In fact, looking at our standard A4 photographic test, I couldn't tell the difference as far as detail capture was concerned, although the colour balance of each image was slightly different. Closer examination revealed fractionally more halftoning in the output of the 740, especially in lighter areas. There's also a hint, close-up, of slightly cleaner reproduction of some of the finer image details. Business graphics were dealt with effortlessly, as you'd expect, and text quality on both plain and coated paper was just as impressive as the 740's, although it still didn't have that laser printer feel.

Epson may not have achieved a dramatic technology advance in the Stylus Photo 750, but it has raised the standard, albeit by the smallest fraction. It may cost a little more than the HP DeskJet 880C - and there's no denying that the 740 is the better compromise of speed and quality - but the quality of the 750's output pushes it to the front of the inkjet pack.