Epson Stylus Photo R1800

One of the advantages of owning a high-megapixel digital camera is that you can print your photos at large sizes without a reduction in quality. The Epson Stylus Photo R1800 allows you to print onto paper sizes from 10 x 15cm right up to A3+ (48 x 33cm) and it uses eight ink cartridges to do so.

Alongside the usual six colour cartridges, the R1800 uses two extra tanks - matte and gloss black. These have been designed to provide a better finish to prints used with Epson's matte and glossy photo papers.

It sounds like just another marketing ploy, but the two extra inks do have an effect. Without any extra enhancement, the R1800 produced prints rich in colour with excellent skin tones and sharp detail. And print quality is difficult to fault.

Naturally, the R1800 will print borderless photos but, using the supplied attachments, it will also print to inkjet-compatible CDs and onto paper rolls, which is good for panoramic shots.

In our tests, a borderless A4 glossy photo took three minutes, 10 seconds to appear, while black text emerged at four pages per minute, which makes this one of the slower printers on the market.

However, if you switch off the photo settings, the R1800 will be able to produce an A3 colour page in under a minute - good news for office workers.

The only drawback to a printer of this ilk (apart from its gigantic footprint) is the cost of ownership. At £89.66 to replace all eight ink cartridges, £24.31 for 50 sheets of A4 Premium Glossy paper and an initial outlay of £350, it's not cheap.

However, photo enthusiasts will no doubt be able to justify the cost by citing its excellent print quality and large variety of paper sizes it can accommodate.