However, when the nozzles work, photos will last longer than you will. Both the R800 and R1800 required nozzle cleaning, as entire colours were missing from prints, even though we’d only printed several 6 x 4in photos since the last print-head clean. One problem we experienced during testing was blocked nozzles. Colour graphics on plain paper are as good as any, and our mono quality test on coated paper had good contrast.
Text quality is fine, and in draft mode is churned out at 9.4ppm. All these problems can be alleviated by manually adjusting colour in the easy-to-use driver, but it’s worth noting that the HP 8750 produced accurate tones straight out of the box. Red was also too pink, and this led to the guard’s uniform not being red enough. On a technical level, the general sharpness and level of detail in photos was fine, but the blocks of colour were under-saturated, particularly yellow. The mono photo suffered from the extra blue, making it look cold and losing some detail in highlights.
An excess of magenta and cyan meant that the baby’s skin tones were a touch anaemic, while the lips were decidedly purple instead of pink. However, place them side-by-side with the iP99’s and you’ll easily notice the differences. In isolation, the R1800’s photomontage prints are great. It took just over two-and-a-half minutes to print our A4 photomontage and almost two minutes more for an A3 version. Using the included Easy-PhotoPrint application (which is considerably more convenient than printing from Photoshop), we saw the R1800 print a 6 x 4in photo in one minute, 25 seconds – not as quick as the iP9950, which was 48 seconds faster. The R1800 isn’t exactly compact, though with the paper trays extended, it measures 613 x 780 x 459mm (WDH). At the rear are USB 2 and FireWire interfaces, and we like that the PSU is integrated, unlike the HP’s external unit, which seems slightly unnecessary given the unit’s gargantuan dimensions. Thanks to the flip-down front panel, you can print directly onto CDs and DVDs – something the HP 8750 can’t do. Buttons on the right-hand side let you cancel jobs, feed roll paper through and change ink tanks, but that’s it in terms of controls.
There isn’t even a PictBridge port on the front. As you’d expect from a printer that’s aimed at the semi-pro market, there are no card readers or TFT on the front – Epson knows that the target audience are much more likely to edit and print photos from Photoshop.