Epson has gone all-out on their digital photo flagship -- it has eliminated all office-centric features to deliver an enthusiast's juggernaut with film scanning, a six colour ink-tank, and plenty of memory card slots.
The only difficulty is that even though it's naturally designed to produce colour prints, it's beaten here by several of the others. Epson's strong point has traditionally been photo printing and it's disappointing to find that its flagship model isn't the best of this bunch. We printed all our photos in the default 'standard photo' mode, and here the Epson displays visible banding in the blue sky areas, and some pixilation in the clouds, even after extensive cleaning and calibrating. However, the woman's face is faithfully reproduced.
As it is primarily a photo printer, the text quality was neither quick nor high quality. It took over seven minutes to print out our 15-page test document.
There are also some minor ergonomic issues with the machine: the cursor keys are set up in a DVD-like manner, but the OK key is underneath instead of in the middle, causing some finger origami. Also, the card slot is in a large bulbous hatch at the front which can make accessing the printed pages difficult.
The unit didn't come with any OCR software, so to complete the OCR testing we used Omnipage SE and found that it performed very well. There were no spelling errors and even part of the graphic remained intact. The colour scan also completed the quickest at 22 seconds and remained faithful to the original image.
On paper, the Epson exhibits a lot of promise, but in use we found it couldn't stand up against the Canon.