Over the last few weeks we have been trying to get together a portfolio of pictures for a couple of special arrivals. As myself and Mrs. Gadget really wanted, and indeed needed, a general purpose printer that could also print out decent photos for a photo album. It was pleasant surprise that the Epson Stylus Photo RX560 really stepped up to the mark and delivered the goods.
First of all, the prints from the printer were really good. To be honest we were not expecting a printer that can print your letters and other general stuff to be much good for anything else and we really expected that we would have to go out and try a specialist photo printer (one of those small efforts that only take small photo paper in them) but we were more than pleasantly surprised when the output far exceeded what we were expecting. The prints were really sharp and the colours vivid.
The printer itself is not really light and is bigger that a lot of domestic printers nowadays. We managed to just about fit it under our small desk at home. Setting up is really easy, we managed to set it up on both PC and Apple Mac without any difficulty. We found the Mac drivers for the printer and scanning functions on the Epson site fairly easy to download and install. Once they were done printing and scanning were a doddle.
As I was scanning in pictures of my surrogate mum and dad, I noticed that it managed to faithfully reproduce the original photographs very well. The driver software captured data from the scanner very well and passed it onto our photo software with ease. The scanner takes up to A4 prints in size.
Printing out was also very easy to do. The ink cartridges use the new Claria ink technologies and we must say for ink this cheap, you really don’t need to go out and buy generic cartridges. For this price it really pays to stick with the Epson ones. The photos were exceptional considering how much the ink costs. (Which works out around £7 per colour cartridge – very cheap!).
The printer comes with a card reader that accepts most types of card. For our test we used a 4GB Seagate Compact Flash card and it had no trouble whatsoever in reading the content on the card.
Overall, we thoroughly recommend this printer, for the money you really can’t go wrong. We managed to find this printer going for around £105 at this website.
Rating: 10/10