A printer that breaks boundaries (Epson Stylus Photo R360)

Member Name: LisaW82

Product:	Epson Stylus Photo R360
Date:	16/02/09 (162 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great quality prints, onscreen display and A4 borderless

Disadvantages: A little expensive, poor CD print alignment and no USB cable

As a regular user of Epson printers over the years, I was presented with needing a desktop printer that could not only offer A4 borderless printing for photographs, but also A4 borderless printing for my personalised greetings cards business that I run through eBay. Having looked at various options, the Epson R360 really stood out from the crowd as potentially offering the most value for money.

From the packaging itself it is clear that what you are buying is a cost effective solution for high quality photo printing, but in reality you are getting a lot more. There are cheaper Epson Photo Printers on the market, but for that extra bit of money, you get neat little features like the onscreen display and memory card slots that save you a lot of time if using it a lot.

The R360 manages to produce excellent quality print outs using the Epson Claria ink system that is tailor made for photo printing. These help to print out your photos with the kind of vibrancy that you would expect from a high street photo developer, not a desktop printer. The downside to these cartridges though is the price and the fact that you need 6, not 4. Added to the Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black cartridges are Light Cyan and Light Magenta. Luckily, you can pick up much cheaper compatible cartridges readily on the net and these do just as good a job, if not quite as bright. Each set of 6 cartridges will produce around 35 full colour A4 printouts, but will obviously go further for black and white and prints of less colour.

The onscreen LCD preview monitor is a nice touch that really helps with your photo printing and general maintenance of the unit. From this screen you can preview the photos that are on the memory stick inserted into the printer at the time, you can perform clean up facilities like head cleaning and nozzle alignment and you can also re-size and enhance colour on photos, all without ever needing to go to your PC. This can prove a much easier process if you are not very computer savvy and want things to be simple. Pictbridge is also present on the R360 which enables you to plug your camera in to the printer and print the photos from there.

The real reason I bought the R360 was purely down to the A4 borderless printing. I sell A5 (A4 folded) greeting cards on eBay and need the front image to be able to bleed off the edge and, thanks to the USB cable linking my R360 to my PC, I can do just that. It does require a little knowledge in using design programs, CorelDraw X3 in my case, to set up the printer margins, but that can easily be learned in about 5 minutes. I have found the borderless printing to work perfectly and, despite my initial concerns before having tried it, there is absolutely no smudging of the roller and thus I can do bulk runs without fear of needing to clean it and do re-prints. To print a full A4 borderless image takes the R360 around 45 seconds on normal and 25 seconds on draft. This is more than adequate for us and very pleasing.

There are some downsides to the printer though. Firstly, this is easily the noisiest printer I have ever had. I have actually had 2 R360 printers now due to volume of prints and they were both exactly the same, really loud. It can be off putting, but sort of goes un-noticed after a while. It is not ideal though.

Also, the CD/DVD printing stencils and features don't really work very well. I am not sure if I have done something wrong, but in my experience of using it, there seems to be some real alignment issues.

These are only minor gripes though in the grand scheme of things and are not important to me and what I need it for, but that is not to say they won't be important to others. So, if CD/DVD printing is your requirement then I would look elsewhere for that.

The major problem that thankfully I didn't encounter, but many people will, is the lack of a USB cable in the box. Epson clearly intend people to use this without a PC, but they have put a PC installation CD in there for a reason, so the omission of the necessary cable seems a little odd to me.

With that said, if you are looking for an A4 borderless solution, capable of vibrant prints from memory stick and PC, then look no further.

Summary: The best at what it does on the market

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