Print High-Quality Photos—and on CDs
REVIEW DATE: 06.11.03
The sticker on the Epson Stylus Photo 900 ($200 street) says, "The Complete Printing Solution for Your Digital Lifestyle." We doubt any printer can live up to that claim, but the quality of the 900's output 900 varies from good to excellent, and as a bonus, you can print directly onto CDs.
Fittingly, the 900 is a photogenic beast, with a handsome design in three shades of gray. As with most photo printers, this one uses six ink colors to produce a wider color gamut than you get with four. One cartridge contains black and a second holds the five color inks. The 5,760- by 720-dpi maximum resolution in best mode also helps maintain subtle shading in photos. You won't find slots for camera memory, so there is no way to print photos without a computer, but the 900 accepts roll paper for continuous printing of multiple photos, and you can also produce borderless prints on paper sizes of 4-by-6, 5-by-7, 8-by-10, and 8.5-by-11 inches.
Setup is standard fare for ink jets: Follow the steps in the foldout poster to plug in the cables, snap in the ink cartridges, and install the software. The poster doesn't show you how to feed a CD for printing, but we had no trouble finding the information in the printed manual.
CDs you want to print go into a separate tray that feeds from the back of the printer in a straight-through path. To go from paper stock to CDs, you have to change the position of a lever and adjust the starting position for the tray. But after going through the steps once, you should have no trouble remembering them. An Epson program for printing CDs includes clip art and tools for inserting graphics, photos, and text so you can easily design and print labels. You can also save labels for reuse.
As you might expect from a photo printer, the 900 is slow for text. A 10-page Microsoft Word file in default Text mode took 6 minutes 25 seconds. Speed is far more acceptable for photos. In best-quality mode, printing onto 8- by 10-inch photo paper took from 7:33 to 7:46, depending on the test shot. Printing CDs, which requires special printable CD-Rs, took roughly 4 minutes 20 seconds. In theory, the 900 works with any printable CD or DVD, but according to Epson, CD-Rs are the only printable format currently available.
Output quality is good to excellent, with true photo quality when printing on photo paper, and good quality for photos, graphics, and text on plain paper. We saw some posterization with graphics on plain paper, but only on images specifically designed to bring out posterization. All told, the slow text speed limits the 900's usefulness as a regular printer. But even then, it's still a good choice as a second printer, and the ability to print on CDs adds significant value.
