Home > Consumer Reviews > Epson Stylus Photo R1900 A3+ Printer

I have owned this printer for a week now and all i can say is that it is truly amazing, i am an architecture student so i use this all the time for plotting off CAD and printing tiled illustrator layouts, you can print on A3+ paper and i get no banding or poor print head alignment as the review below suggests. The only problem that i can see with this printer is that the ink cartridges are too small at only 11ml, my canon A4 printer has 13ml! apart from that this printer is top notch and i will always use epson for A3 as i have previously used R1800 and 1290 and they have all served for many years before needing to be replaced! All my course mates are dying to get their hands on an A3 printer now and i will definately be reccomending this one!

Epson Stylus Photo R1900 A3+ Printer

I'm a professional photographer and have to agree with the other review from the Graphic Designer.... Don't get this one.

Build quality is excellent and I had high hopes as it was unpacked and plugged in. The print quality was poor to begin with and only after plenty of fiddling, tweaking and general frustration have I got to a point where the prints are nearly as good as my ancient Photo EX (now a museum piece). I really expected to see an improvement in 10 years!

I print only matt prints and have never used a single piece of gloss paper, however I've used two gloss black cartridges and three gloss optimisers in two months (and about 50 A3 prints) - this is because every time you switch on or do a nozzle clean it cleans all nozzles. When is Epson going to improve software to allow you to purge ONLY the tank you've just replaced or need to clean? You do a 'nozzle check' and there may be one or two colours playing up - why not purge only those colours instead of spraying those precious 11mls (what a joke!) of ink into the sponge at the side?

I'm putting this one on ebay so if you think it's great and want it - come and get it. I'm off to look at the R2880 - it is getting decent reviews though does still suffer with the pathetic 11ml tanks....

i have had the benefit of owning both the canon ix 5000 and this printer. the epson 1900 wins by a mile, none of the driver problems mentioned above were encountered. the prints are much more dynamic and colourful than the canon. in all highly rated but marked down for the small sized ink cartridges.

with regard to printing high quality photos stick to epson ink... other makes will be inferior and possibly have significant stability problems

I am a freelance Graphic Designer in the Film and TV industry and the work has to be produced instantaneously and often with very little preperation - I normally use my Epson 1290 which has done me proud for years - but unforunately died on me at the beginning of this contract (mainly because I had to reinstall the driver software from the Epson website - which turned out to not work properly - as just a gimp driver- this doesn't seems to give as many options/ work as well as the old driver that used to be available) - so I had to quickly get my hands on a decent printer and at an average price of £350 pounds you would have thought this printer would be reliable and deliver what you need on demand - but unfortunatly it has disappointed on many levels - give me back my old 1290 any day. Basically my advice would be - don't touch this printer with a barge-pole. It is seriously bad - the driver software doesn't include an A3+ sheet feeder option on my version (whether that is accross the board or not - the Epson customer services won't help. The printer often prints badly with bands on the prints after printing a few pages. Also the alignment goes off centre by at least half an inch when doing lots of photographic quality prints at a time. It drinks ink and the cartridges are nigh on impossible to get hold of at a local level on an immediate basis (even Epson often don't have them in stock), just for the record I've always bought epson products i.e printers/scanners and have always used epson inks and papers in all my equipment. I will not buy another Epson product after this experience.

Contrary to some other reviews, I am very satisfied with this printer. The build quality is good and the printed results (on a variety of media) are excellent. I have owned it for just over 3 months and have not encountered any of the problems experienced by some of the other reviewers. As with all inkjet printers (particularly A3 format) the ink cartridges are ludicrously small and consequently I shall shortly be changing to a professional quality bulk ink supply system that claims a fifth of the running cost. This means that this additional investment will be recovered quite quickly.
Installation was easy in spite of the rather inadequate instruction 'manual' (sic).