Review: Epson Stylus Photo R200

Photo printers are becoming much more common as digital camera enthusiasts decide to print their own photographs rather than send the to a retail developer. As a result, print vendors are looking for ways to distinguish their products from the rest. Epson has found one way with their Stylus Photo R200. This compact, well-engineered, printer brings two advantages to the table: it's inexpensive, and it has the ability to labels directly onto printable CD/DVD discs.

Design

The Stylus Photo R200 comes in a sleek, nicely designed form: all burnished silver and black. With its paper trays attached, the printer takes up 18.5 x 19.0 x 11.9 inches. It weighs 11.4 pounds without its ink cartridges.

The 100-page input tray feeds in from a high angle in back, while finished documents slip onto an output tray in front. Both the power cord and the USB 1.1 connection are in back, however, there's also an extra USB 1.1 connection available to the left of the output tray, which can be a convenient feature. On top of the printer cover are the printer's three sole buttons: ink (for changing cartridges), paper (for paper problems) and power.

Starting Up

Installation was painless and relatively quick, using the instruction sheet that came with the printer. Surprisingly in the device in this price range, the R200 uses six ink cartridges, which means that its color output is sharper and brighter than four-cartridge printers. Based on 5 percent coverage, the black ink cartridge is expected to yield up to 630 pages of text or 450 pages of graphics, while the color ink has an expected yield of 430 pages. Keep in mind that it's highly unusual for a photo printer (which usually prints on most or all of a document) to only cover 5 percent of a page, so the true number of pages per cartridge will probably be much less.

The printer offers full bleed printing (in other words, printing to the edge, rather than leaving a border) on a variety of paper sizes, up to 8.3 x 128 inches (with certain applications used with Windows 2000 or XP). It will produce borderless photos up to 8x10 in size.

The Printer At Work

Once it was installed, I was quite satisfied with the device's general performance. Color photos produced by the printer were bright and vibrant, especially when published on specialized photo paper. As with many photo printers, the text printing was not quite as good; there were a few ragged edges noticeable in the lettering.

The printer offers up to 15ppm print speed in both black and color inks. I'm not sure how close to that speed it came in casual use; the device was a bit hesitant to start, especially after it had been sitting for a while, and thought it is quiet and makes little fuss, it did strike me as being slightly slower than others of its class.

The CD printing is pretty nifty. A special drawer, which has an indentation for a CD (and a special piece for a small CD) fits into the front of the printer. When given the "print" command, the R200 pulls the disc into the printer and transfers the image. I expected to have to try several times before I got it right, but I was able to print a rather nice graphic image on my CD the first time around. The included software, Epson Print CD, was simple to install and use. One thing to note: You cannot print just on any CD, but on CDs that are especially labeled for printing.