Pure Porn (Epson Stylus Photo 1290)

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Product:	Epson Stylus Photo 1290
Date:	19/05/03 (501 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: QUALITY

Disadvantages: B/W

Well i hope title got you to read it ya perverts.

I paid the amount of £325in a CURRYS store. They had to order the printer from Epson, which took about a week.


The printer is delivered with a roll paper holder as standard equipment. Installation was no problem on my Macintosh blue- white G 3. I had the Epson Photo 1270 before, which i sold on ebay Germany for about £200a week ago. Thus the step-up was only a modest £120 for me.


How do the two printers compare, based on a first imperession?


The 1290 offers, besides the roll paper holder, which i probably will never use, two advantages - printing with 2.880 x 720 dpi and the ability to print up to A3+ without borders, which roughly equals the maximum printout size of the Epson 1520. Anyway, A3+ edge to edge is a rather big printout and this ability keeps paper waste to minimum.


Does the 1290 give you better prints than the 1270? Well, the print quality seems to be virtually identical to me.


Ink drops are not visible with the naked eye, now matter how hard i looked for them. The 2.880 dpi setting gives a slight advantage with small printouts, these come out very sharp. That can look unnatural, because "real" photoprints are never quite as sharp. Also, you have to beware of "Unsharp Masking" in Photoshop, you see all the artifacts induced by this filter very clearly. The 2880 dpi setting slows down the printer tremendously, to about 1/3 of the usual speed (with 1440 dpi).


I´ve noticed immediately two advantages of the 1290: The very slight banding of my old 1270 has gone completely! The imprints of the transportation wheels are gone too and you can adjust the 1290 for thicker paper like the Premium Glossy Photo Paper. I´m not satisfied yet with the color fidelity, but that´s a book in itself and i just started to fiddle with the settings.


In general, the printer is certanly worth the mo
ney, since it´s even cheaper than the 1270 was when introduced.


Is it worth to step up from the already excellent 1270? Well, if you can get a reasonable price for the 1270 or have the (admittedly very slight) banding problem with the 1270 and/or need the bigger printouts, certainly yes.


Question is: Where will it go from here? There certainly is a difference between the prints from the 1290 and "real" prints, in that the prints from Epson are much sharper and have more vivid, clearer colors. There certainly is no difference in that you can´t see single inkdrops (in color prints) without using a magnifier glass. The two Premium papers are as good as i can imagine.


So what will the Photo 1300 give us? Well i´d sure like real posterlike sizes from a £300 printer and/or an 8 color printer and/or the ability to print b/w without a color shift (haven´t tried b/ w on the 1290 yet, but the 1270 was pretty good on monochrome setting).

OVERALL
ONE GOOD BUY

Summary: