Epson’s latest photo printers, the Stylus Photo R265 and Stylus Photo R360 both take advantage of newly developed ink technology to achieve better print quality. Here, we’re reviewing the top-end model, which includes a 3.5in LCD and a selection of image-editing facilities that work independently from your PC.

Claiming print times as fast as 13 seconds for a 6x4in photo, the Stylus Photo R360 appears at first glance to be tantalisingly close to HP’s claimed 12-second rating and yet at a considerably lower price.

In our tests, the R360 performed pretty well when printing photos, but on default settings it was no match for the HP Photosmart D7360. When printing standard A4 documents, the gap grew wider still. When compared with the Canon Pixma IP6700D, it’s certainly horses for courses, with the two swapping places regularly from test to test.

Epson claims to have achieved some of its gains in print speed through the use of its new five-level variable droplet size technology. The smallest droplet size of 1.5 picolitres is used for areas with fine detail, while larger droplets are used to fill in areas of solid colour more quickly and evenly. This enables gains in both quality and performance and could explain why some test results were faster than others.

When it comes to running costs, Epson was far from helpful. While the spec sheets will tell you that individual ink cartridges start from only £6.99, no yield information is published (and Epson would not give us such information) making it impossible to estimate how much prints will cost.

The printer itself, however, gives you some idea of how many pages there are left to print based on the last type of page printed. However, this doesn’t kick in until you have less than 100 prints left.

Epson’s Photo Enhance technology detects the content of photos and applies enhancements automatically. It can spot skin tones, landscapes and sky and will attempt to fix common problems, such as when a subject is silhouetted against bright back-lighting.

In our tests, the R360 did a very good job of bringing out bright colours from our source material without them appearing over-processed. Under very close scrutiny, prints seemed a little lower in contrast and sharpness but higher in colour when compared with either the Canon or HP printers.

It was also the only printer that gave us perfect borderless A4 prints every time, without the need for any tweaking in the drivers to eliminate small white margins.

Using the built-in image browsing functions was a little faster on the R360 than on Canon’s IP6700. It found 73 photos on our memory card very quickly and let us whiz around the colourful menus with very little waiting. Also included on the R360 is the ability to print frames from video clips. We tried three, in Mov, Avi and Wmv format but unfortunately none of these seemed to be compatible with the printer.

Printing onto DVDs or CDs is also possible with the R360, although it doesn’t have the option of double-sided printing or the covered paper trays of the HP Photosmart D7360.

The Stylus Photo R360 costs a lot less than the D7360, but there are also significant features missing. However it’s capable of creating impressive photos and has a user interface that’s friendlier and easier to use than Canon’s.

This article is part of a group test of A4 photo printers
See also
Canon Pixma IP6700D
HP Photosmart D7360
How we tested the photo inkjet printers
Photo printing under Windows Vista
Graphs and table of features can be read via our pdf downloads above