Epson Stylus Photo R340

New to Epson’s extensive Stylus Photo range is the R340. It is a six-ink model comprising black, cyan, magenta and yellow, along with light cyan and light magenta cartridges for more realistic photo prints.

A 2.4in colour LCD screen sits on the front of the R340 and, with the multiformat card reader, allows for PC-free printing. Epson has also squeezed a CD burner into the printer. Once you’ve burnt your photos to a CD-R, you can use the R340 to print a label on the disc. You can also back up to Iomega Zip disks.

Epson’s installation guide is easy to understand and we got the R340 up and running in next to no time. In our tests, it took just under four minutes to print an A4 colour photo and, on Epson’s Ultra Glossy paper, the quality was outstanding. Colours were rich and there was no visible banding.

Print speeds for plain text are rated at 15ppm (pages per minute) by Epson. Our own benchmarks returned a slightly slower 9ppm and 2.2ppm for a standard pdf.

Running costs are quite high. Epson quotes a life of 630 pages of text for the black ink and 430 pages for each colour cartridge ­ all at five per cent coverage. Replacements cost around £12 for each of the six inks.

The R340 incorporates some potentially useful features, but you have to ask yourself how often you’d use it to burn photos directly to CD or print without first previewing on your PC’s monitor.

If you are in the market for a high-quality printer with the option of printing independently of your PC, the R340 is a decent model at an equally attractive price. Alternatively, if you’re purely after 6 x 4 photo prints, consider the excellent Epson Picturemate 100.