Epson Printers

I recently had an excuse to upgrade my printer and decided to buy an Epson Stylus Color 740, which can produce some quite impressive colour prints, especially if used with photo quality paper and 1440 dots/inch print. Send for the examples from Epson (via their Web site) and you will see the excellent results that can be achieved. Ink drops as small as 6 picolitres (Aye, just think how many of them you can get from a bottle of Scotch!) produce images that are better than anything that I can source, I think. The video camera and the Kodak DC120 certainly can't give it a run for its money!

Epson also produce the Stylus Photo 750 printer, which uses 5 colour inks (cyan, magenta and yellow plus light cyan and light magenta). The theory is that in pale areas - e.g. skin tones - the light inks permit more dots, which gives better fidelity than the darker inks that need to operate with higher dot spacing. This makes perfect sense but I somehow didn't fancy the idea of an ink cartridge with 4 colours OK but one run out - and, let's face it, one must run out first! So, I opted for the 740 with its 3 colour plus separate black cartridge.

Here are two shots of pale areas in some samples from Epson, taken using a x10 objective and the video camera. The dot diameter in each case is about the same - c. 45 micron.

On the left, the 740 with 3 colour inks.

On the right, the 750 with its 5 colour inks, allowing more dots for pale areas.