Epson Stylus Photo 915

With more and more people buying digital cameras, inkjet printer manufacturers haven't been slow to spot a gap in the colour printer market.

Printing colour photos on your inkjet is all very well but not everyone wants to go through the rigmarole of turning on their PC and transferring the images from the camera to do it.

The solution is a printer with a built-in memory card slot, just like the Epson Stylus Photo 915.

The breadbin school of inkjet printer design has been dominant for a few years and the 915 is a classic example. That's not to say it's unattractive. As far as printers go, its black and grey case is inoffensive enough.

Paper stacks into a vertical slot at the rear but the support for this is curved. As a result, paper left in place for a few days gained a matching curve, so you might want to think twice about leaving costly paper unused in the printer for any length of time.

Printed pages are deposited onto a tray that telescopes from the front of the printer but again, this isn't quite long enough to support the whole page and it leaves the end to droop onto the desk.

These niggles aside, the 915 performs rather well. It plugs into a USB port and, once we managed to force the driver to install as English rather than Portuguese, we were churning out glossy A4 photo prints at a rate of one every seven minutes or so.

The results were very good, even if the glossy paper supplied was a little too thin to pass for a real photo. With edge-to-edge printing on photo-size paper the results are more convincing.

Pop a memory card into one of the supplied PC Card adapters and you can print from the card using the PC Card slot on the front of the 915, without a PC in sight.

You'll need to know which image to print beforehand, but you can print an index sheet first and choose from that.

Price: £179 (incl. VAT)

Contact: Epson 0800 220546
www.epson.co.uk

Also consider: HP PHOTOSMART 1315
Super photos but for serious money. £299 *****.

See also:

Lexmark Z65p

An affordable inkjet that supports most types of memory card and offers two paper trays.  31 Mar 2003

Canon i550

High-quality printing at an amazing price.  20 Mar 2003

Epson Stylus Photo 950

The Stylus Photo 950 delivers excellent picture quality but at a hefty price.  25 Jul 2002

Canon S750

A 'photo-quality' inkjet printer at a fair price.  04 Jul 2002

Epson Photo 810

The Stylus Photo 810 boasts photo-quality prints.  04 Mar 2002

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