Nikon 1 S1

The compact system camera (CSC) market is getting increasingly crowded and homogenised, but there's no risk of the Nikon 1 system blending in. These cameras are smaller and lighter than rival CSC systems, but that's mostly because their 13.2x8.8mm sensors are quite a bit smaller than the 17.3x13mm and 23.5x15.6mm sensors used elsewhere. And whereas most CSCs offer SLR-like control, the more affordable models in the Nikon 1 range are unashamedly point-and-shoot devices.

This is all the more true of the S1, which establishes a new entry-level line below the J3 and V2 models. It swaps the J3's aluminium body for plastic, and omits a mode dial. Instead, its various modes are selected by pressing the F button and spinning the rear wheel. As with the J3 and its predecessors, the available options are quirky scene presets rather than conventional PASM shooting modes, which are hidden away as a subset of the Creative mode.


The S1 introduces a new 11-27.5mm kit lens, which gives a 35mm-equivalent focal length range of 30-74mm. It collapses down for transit, extending just 31mm from the camera – 10mm less than the kit lens bundled with other Nikon 1 cameras. The downside is a smaller 2.5x zoom range and a lack of optical stabilisation. This isn't an absolutely crucial feature, but omitting it means faster shutter speeds are necessary to avoid camera shake. This in turn pushes up the ISO speed and noise levels.
This isn't the only compatible lens, of course. The Nikon 1 system is growing fast, with nine lenses currently available. Still, that's a long way behind the Sony NEX system (15 lenses) and Panasonic and Olympus's Micro Four Thirds (38 lenses).
One compelling advantage of the S1 over its rivals is that fitting a telephoto lens doesn't add significantly to its bulk. A dual lens kit is available for around £520 including VAT, which includes the 11-27.5mm plus a 30-110mm lens (81-297mm in 35mm-equivalent values) – a strong candidate for wildlife and sports photography. This lens is also remarkably small and light, at 180g and 61mm long when retracted for transit.

PERFORMANCE AND BATTERY
As with the rest of the Nikon 1 range, the S1 is particularly well suited to sports and wildlife photography because of its fast continuous performance. It can capture 15 frames at 15, 30 or 60fps, and is ready to go again a couple of seconds later. Even more useful is the ability to shoot at 5fps with continuous autofocus. It kept this speed up for an impressive 33 frames before slowing to 2.7fps. This mode is ideal for tracking moving subjects, and this performance is significantly faster than any of its rivals.

5fps shooting with continuous autofocus is ideal for wildlife photography. This shot was taken with the 30-110mm lens, but we had to dig in the menus for the shutter priority mode in order to freeze motion with a 1/1,000s shutter speed
Sadly, the S1 isn't so nippy in normal use. We measured 1.4 seconds between shots, which is almost three times slower than the Panasonic GF6 and Olympus E-PM2. Meanwhile, the controls seem to be designed to prevent casual users stumbling upon conventional manual controls such as ISO speed, autofocus mode and white balance. There's a bare minimum of buttons, no quick-access menu, and the most useful controls are inexplicably spread across different parts of the main menu.
CSC Shootout - SPEED TEST - Sony NEX-3N, Olympus Pen E-PM2, Nikon S1 and Panasonic GF6

Here we compare shooting speed, single drive and continuous (JPEG and RAW) between the four current budget CSCs
Another big disappointment is the battery life, which is quoted at 220 shots. Heavy use of the continuous shooting modes could mean it runs out in an hour or two. Spare batteries are reasonably priced at £36 but we'd say at least one is an essential purchase.

Olympus Pen E-PM2

The E-PM2 is the entry-level model in the PEN range, but it still boasts some upmarket features. Its metal body houses the same 16-megapixel sensor that's used in Olympus's top-of-the-range Olympus OMD E-M5. Continuous shooting is at 8fps – double what most CSCs at this price manage and only a shade behind the E-M5's 9fps performance.

There's an accessory shoe that accepts not just external flashguns but also an electronic viewfinder, microphone input, Bluetooth dongle (for wireless photo transfers to Android devices) and even a pair of macro LED lamps on flexible arms. There's a small flash unit included in the box, but it's no brighter than a typical integrated flash and rather spoils the camera's sleek design. We suspect a lot of people will leave it in the back of a drawer and forget about it.


Optical image stabilisation is incorporated into the sensor so it works with any lens. This includes wide-aperture lenses, which rarely have stabilisation built in. It's also worth noting the wide range of compatible Micro Four Thirds lenses – far more than for competing Sony NEX, Nikon 1 and Samsung NX systems.
CONTROLS
It all bodes well for keen photographers who want a sophisticated camera but don't have vast amounts of cash to spend, or perhaps who prefer to stock up on lenses rather than buy the most expensive camera body. However, these kinds of users may be less enamoured by the E-PM2's controls. It's no surprise that there's just a small scattering of buttons – that's typical for entry-level CSCs – but accessing key features is slower than on rival cameras.
There's a quick-access menu with 14 functions laid out over two pages, but fewer functions on a single page would be quicker to navigate. We doubt that many people feel the need to adjust the video resolution or toggle the video soundtrack on and off on a regular basis, and drive mode already has a dedicated labelled button. The six customisable functions on the Sony NEX-3N's quick-access menu work better, as does the Panasonic GF6's 11 functions that are all visible at once and can be jumped to using the touchscreen. The E-PM2's screen is touch-sensitive but it isn't used in either the quick-access or the main menu.


The touchscreen proves its worth when moving the autofocus point, though. It also goes a long way towards making up for the lack of a mode dial. Pressing the Menu button reveals the various modes, which can be selected by touching the screen.
The main menu is vast, spanning 23 pages. There's huge scope to customise the camera's behaviour but we didn't find it easy tracking down specific functions. It's not helped by cryptic labels such as FL BKT and Rls Priority S. Pressing the info button reveals explanations, but some of these provide no further clarity and they aren't available in sub-menus.
PERFORMANCE
Autofocus is seriously quick, and it's backed up by extremely responsive subject tracking. It took 0.6 seconds between shots in program mode, but iAuto mode was a little slower, at 0.8 seconds. The 8fps continuous shooting lasted for 19 frames before slowing to 2.9fps – a superb result. It maintained this top 8fps speed for 14 raw frames too. It's great to see Olympus pairing this fast performance with a decent-sized buffer. Continuous mode with updating autofocus was at 2.9fps.

IMAGE QUALITY - CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE
Image quality was generally excellent, as we'd expect from a camera that shares the same sensor and image processing engine as the £1,000 E-M5. Colours were rich and flattering and details were crisp, with noise remaining unobtrusive up to ISO 3200. The top ISO 25600 is overly optimistic but we'd use ISO 12800 for casual snaps.

There's barely any evidence of noise in this low-light shot
Image quality wasn't faultless, though. Whereas most CSCs use digital correction to eliminate chromatic aberrations, this isn't available in Pen cameras. Sure enough, tell-tale halos of discolouration was visible towards the edges of the frame in high-contrast scenes. We found the autofocus to be a little unwieldy when shooting macro subjects. Otherwise, autofocus was up to scratch but it wasn't always as reliably sharp as the Panasonic GF6's.

Fujifilm X-A1

Compact system cameras (CSCs) have reached new heights of sophistication and refinement this year. While it's nice to be spoiled for choice, it also makes the choice much harder. With the X-M1, Fujifilm raised the bar for image quality, with exceptionally sharp details and low noise from its innovative X-Trans sensor. Its nippy performance, superb controls, Wi-Fi and elegant appearance with a hint of retro chic didn't hurt its chances, either. However, with a price just shy of £700, it's more expensive than other cameras with similar features, such as the Sony NEX-5R (and the practically identical NEX-5T which simply adds NFC to the its already strong list of features).

The Fujifilm X-A1 tucks in below the X-M1 to form the new entry-level model in the X Mount line-up. From the outside the two cameras are almost indistinguishable. Other than the inscription on the front, the only difference we can spot is the texture to the front of the camera body. Wi-Fi is built in for wireless transfers to Android and iOS devices, but there's no remote control function.


Both cameras use the same articulated LCD screen and the same controls. There's a dedicated mode dial and dual command dials for direct access to shutter speed, aperture and exposure compensation, depending on the selected mode. The Fn button is customisable and makes for a useful ISO speed control.


There are labelled buttons on the back for autofocus area, white balance, macro focus and drive mode. Pressing the Q button reveals 15 icons on the screen for quick access to everything from autofocus mode to film simulation presets and even LCD brightness. It's arguably the most elegant and efficient control system on a CSC.

THE BIG BUT - CLICK IMAGE SAMPLES TO ENLARGE
The crucial difference between the two cameras is the sensor. It has the same 16-megapixel resolution and the same physical size – exactly the same size as consumer SLRs' sensors. However, while the X-M1 uses Fujifilm's latest X-Trans technology, the X-A1 uses a more conventional sensor design.
As a result, the X-A1 couldn't replicate the stunning sharp details and low noise that we saw from the X-M1. In fact, details looked slightly imprecise not just compared to the X-M1 but also up against the Sony NEX-5R and Panasonic GX7. The difference was pretty subtle, and in many photos we were hard pressed to notice it at all. However, dense textures proved to be a trickier challenge. We wouldn't describe detail levels as poor, but they weren't quite up to the standard we'd hope for from a 16-megapixel CSC.



Low-light tests gave less cause for concern, with little evidence of noise at ISO 3200. However, JPEGs exhibited tell-tale signs of heavy noise reduction, with even less definition to subtle details such as skin, hair and fabric. It's still a great result, and broadly in line with the superb noise levels we've seen from Sony NEX cameras. However, it can't live up to the high standards set by the X-M1.

PERFORMANCE
The new sensor hasn't affected continuous performance, matching the X-M1 with a 5.5fps top speed. With a fast SDHC card it kept that pace for 44 shots before slowing slightly to 4.4fps – a tremendous result. Switching to raw mode saw performance fall to 1.4fps after 11 shots. Autofocus wasn't as responsive as on the X-M1, though. We measured times of 0.5 to 0.9 seconds between fully pressing the shutter button and capturing a photo. The X-M1 managed 0.3 to 0.4 seconds in the same test. This contributed to a slightly disappointing 1.2 seconds between shots in normal use – hardly a poor result, but the Panasonic GX7 proves that SLR-like performance is possible from a CSC with its 0.4-second shot-to-shot time. We also found that autofocus was a little unreliable when shooting moving subjects in low light.
The video mode is light on features, with a fixed 30fps frame rate, a 14-minute maximum clip length and no control over exposure settings. Details in videos were a little sharper than we saw from the X-M1, but we spotted moiré interference on repeating patterns such as bricks and fabric. Video autofocus wasn't really up to the job, with regular focus hunting when recording nearby subjects.

CONCLUSION
The prospect of a more affordable X-M1 is appealing. £700 is a worryingly large amount to spend on a compact camera, while £500 seems a little more sane. It's great to find the same controls at this price, but that's only half of the X-M1's success story. Without its outstanding sensor, the X-A1 isn't nearly as enticing, even at this price.

The range is beautifully-formed, but small in terms of lens support
With less reasons to love it, the reasons to be wary become more prominent. It's relatively heavy and bulky for a CSC, its video mode is disappointing and X Mount lenses are expensive and few in number. It's still an impressive camera, but by today's lofty standards, that's not enough to stand out.

Canon Selphy CP900

While an inkjet might seem like the obvious choice for printing photos at home, it's not the only one. The Selphy CP900 is the latest in Canon's range of dye-sublimation photo printers. It comes with a large colour screen, a memory card slot and support for wireless networking.

For the uninitiated, dye-sublimation printers use a ribbon that's permeated with a solid dye. As the paper moves through the printer, the ribbon above it is heated, causing the dye to sublimate (become a gas without first becoming a liquid) and re-solidify on the cool paper, forming an image. This takes place in four quick passes beginning with yellow, then magenta and cyan to complete the image, then finally a clear protective overcoat.
Supplies for the CP900 come in matched packs of ribbons and paper, so the 36-sheet KP-36IN supply will print exactly 36 6x4in prints, for example. You can even use the prints as postcards thanks to address and stamp markings. Other formats, including sticker packs are available, but the printer can't handle anything larger than postcard size.


This is a small and attractive printer but, like other dye-subs, it requires a deceptive amount of space on the desk. The lidded clip-in media tray makes it about 300mm deep, and you must leave around 200mm of free space at the back to avoid blocking the paper as it emerges from the back of the printer during prints. It's important to keep the working area free from dust, as it can cause quite significant blemishes on a dye-sub print. With ribbons lasting only a maximum 36 prints, you'll be changing them fairly often, but it's a simple clip-in job and there's no mess.


The Selphy doesn't do much but print photos, so the driver has comparatively few options
The CP900's thermal print head means it needs a quiet cooling fan and uses slightly more power than you might expect, but it's quieter than most inkjets and faster than any we've tested. Over a USB connection, it takes around 55 seconds to print each borderless 6x4in print, although we found this increased to nearly 90 seconds over Wi-Fi, which is almost double Canon's 47-second claim.


You can tweak the colours and contrast of prints; many of ours seemed muted using the default settings
Prints from the CP900 were free of grain, and didn't suffer any obvious softness - a potential weakness in the dye-sub process. We weren't overly impressed with their colours, though, which seemed muted. The printer also struggled to cope with the smooth progression of shades in the blue sky of one test picture, seemingly running out of range at the darker end and tending toward blocks of a single shade.
This Canon Selphy CP900 is a quick photo printer, but the best photo inkjets produce superior prints. Alternatively, for those in less of a hurry, an online service such as Snapfish has no upfront fee and each print costs about half as much.

Brother MFC-J4510DW

At a glance, the MFC-J4510DW is clearly a departure for Brother. While hardly gorgeous, it's a much smarter and more attractive design than is typical of Brother’s MFPs. It's also the first printer we've reviewed that feeds A4 paper in a landscape orientation, the purpose of which is to facilitate A3 printing without consuming more desk space than is necessary.

Brother stresses that the MFC-J4510DW is an occasional A3 printer, and this is definitely the case. The primary paper tray is A4 only, and A3 sheets must be inserted into the printer one at a time via a slot at the rear. It doesn’t have a proper A3 input tray, so the user must ensure A3 sheets are picked and fed properly. We found the narrow slot made the process difficult, with several misfeeds during our early attempts. With experience, we learned it was best to load the paper and make sure the screen showed “manual feed slot ready” before sending an A3 job.
There's a similar problem with the output tray which, while fine for A4, isn't long enough to support an A3 page. The printer is smart enough not to fully eject the printed sheet, however, preventing it falling onto the floor.


It's a shame that A3-printing isn't delivered faultlessly, as this printer doesn't excel in many other respects. In some areas it seems better made and finished than some other Brother MFPs we've reviewed, but the paper input tray was rattled, and the retaining arm for the tilting scanner bed felt as if it needed to be forced back down again, and we had to check that it wasn't snagged on anything.
This is a fast text printer, peaking at almost 19 pages per minute in draft mode. The results were clear and very legible, but at normal quality the text was still clearly produced by an inkjet, having slightly fuzzy outlines. We were surprised by this printer's poor colour output, which seemed pale and suffered from a couple of subtle vertical imperfections running down the length of each page. Fortunately, the scanner was also rapid, and its results perfectly good enough for office tasks.


This printer supports regular and high-capacity ink cartridges, and using the latter should result in reasonable running costs of about 5.3p per page of mixed text and graphics. Text-only prints are likely to be a little less than the 1.8p ISO/IEC 24712 figure suggests. Unfortunately, at £170 the MFC-J4510DW is quite expensive in the first place; it's own Brother MFC-J5910DW may be bigger and uglier but at £100 it's a better, cheaper MFP if you need A3 printing.

HP Officejet Pro X576dw

HP’s Officejet Pro X576dw is an inkjet multifunction peripheral for businesses. Like Lomond’s Evojet Office it uses stationary print heads, albeit HP’s own PageWide system rather than Memjet's technology. This device is lighter than it looks, uses far less power than a laser and generates much less heat.

Unlike a normal inkjet, which needs to wait for small heads to traverse the page, the wide head in the X576dw covers the entire page width while the paper flows underneath without pause. The speed boost is remarkable, and HP claims a 70ppm print speed at draft settings, which is fast enough to embarrass a departmental laser printer.


The Officejet Pro X576dw’s 792Mhz processor is pretty powerful, and it’s possible to use other functions, such as scanning to a USB stick, while the X576dw is printing; we didn’t spot any sluggishness when we tried.
Having experienced the ultra-fast Lomond Evojet, we were ready for astonishing print speeds, but we didn’t get them on our first try. The default Professional quality setting prioritises quality over speed, but the X576dw still completed our 25-page text test at 32ppm. Set to General Office, it managed the same test at 45.5ppm, including the time taken to spool the print job, which is an exact match for the Evojet. Timed over 100 pages, it printed at more than a page per second.

This printer uses unique print quality terms; what’s wrong with Draft, Normal and High?
The X576dw delivered our colour test at an impressive 22.5ppm, but at General Office quality it flew along at 34.3ppm – the fastest colour result we’ve ever seen. It also delivered one of the fastest duplex (double-sided) prints we’ve seen, printing 10 colour sides on 5 sheets in 33 seconds.
HP has paired the Officejet Pro X576dw with a quick scanner, too. A single mono or colour photocopy took just nine seconds. 10-page monochrome copies print in only 37 seconds, and colour in 45 seconds. This is astonishingly quick. Regular scans were fast, even over Wi-Fi, with a 300dpi A4 scan needing just 10 seconds. A 1,200dpi 6x4in photo scan completed in 46 seconds.

We’re not great fans of HP’s oversimplified scan interface, but it’s good enough for general office work
Copy quality was high, as was print quality, although there was a subtle pixilation visible at the General Office setting. Photographs lacked impact on plain paper, however, and HP didn’t supply any of its recommended ColorLok paper for us to test. Scans were sharp, with accurate colours and good dynamic range, although there were some visible artefacts.
Using HP’s 970XL black and 971XL colour cartridges, colour prints cost 3.3per page and black prints cost just 0.8p per page. The X576dw isn’t cheap to buy, but it’s extremely cheap to run. The X576dw might not quite match the print quality of a similarly expensive colour laser MFP, but its speed and low running costs are much better, winning it a Business Buy award.

HP OfficeJet 150

We’ve eagerly awaited the Officejet 150 since HP announced it last May because this portable multifunction printer (MFP) uses a Lithium ion battery, so you really can use it to print on the move.

The compact Officejet 150 is about the size of a cereal packet, but HP’s managed to cram in a printer, scanner, colour touchscreen and a memory card slot for photo printing. When not in use, the paper input tray folds forward and clips firmly over the top, and the paper output flap flips up to protect the front.
The Officejet 150 is made from unusually thick plastic, which helps give the impression that it could survive many business trips. It isn’t perfect, though, as it weighs 3.1kg and the rear-mounted battery is exposed to knocks.


Sadly, the Officejet 150 doesn’t support Wi-Fi, but you can connect to it using Bluetooth or a USB cable. You can print from Windows Phone, Android and BlackBerry devices, but the latter two need third-party apps.
We’re often critical of HP’s software interfaces, but the print drivers supplied with the Officejet 150 are near-perfect. The default tab contains shortcuts and simple options to cover most needs, and additional options are easy to find, but we’re less keen on the TWAIN scan interface. Selecting a resolution is too fiddly and it doesn’t remember the last settings you used, but it does offer more precise control than many HP products we’ve reviewed.


Unusually for an HP scanner you can actually change some reasonably advanced settings
When printing, the Officejet 150 managed a little less than half the speed we expect from a full-sized inkjet, managing 6.8ppm when printing high-quality black text. It was quite slow to print colour graphics, reaching only 1.8ppm on our test, but the results were indistinguishable from a typical good inkjet. Colours had plenty of impact, while blacks were crisp and bold. Photo prints were perfectly acceptable too, although borderless A4 printing isn’t supported. The only slight disappointment was repeated misfeeds when using the Fast Draft setting, and it couldn’t complete our draft text test.


The print driver’s shortcuts tab contains most of the settings you’ll ever need
Its scanner was very slow, needing one minute and 23 seconds to capture a single A4 image at 150dpi. This had a knock-on effect on photocopies, with a single page taking about 65 seconds for a single page to copy, whether colour or mono. We can’t complain about the quality of the results, however.
The Officejet 150 is expensive, but not unreasonable when you consider that the best single-function mobile scanners cost around £200. At less than 7p per page, its running costs aren’t too bad, either. It’s a shame scans and copies aren’t faster, but even so this is a unique product which delivers great results, earning itself a Business Buy award.

Canon Pixma MX455

Canon's PIXMA MX455 is a small inkjet multifunction peripheral (MFP) for home offices. It can scan, print, copy and send and receive faxes. It doesn’t have a wired Ethernet port, but it can connect to a wireless network for sharing among several users. The only feature we miss is automatic duplex (double-sided) printing, but the driver will help you do it manually.
The MX455 isn't as flashy as some PIXMA models, but we like its refreshingly no-fuss design. There's no memory card reader and no colour display, but we found the simple LCD screen and dedicated function buttons less confusing than the context-sensitive screen-and-button system found on many mid-range PIXMAs. The scanner lid incorporates a 30-sheet automatic document feeder, and is secured by hinges that extend upwards to let the lid close flat when scanning thick originals on the platen. Initially, the single paper input tray seems longer than necessary and the output tray too short, until you discover that printed pages come to rest across both. It’s an odd arrangement, but it works perfectly well.

Canon claims a 9.7ppm maximum speed for this printer, and it came very close in our tests; reaching 9.3ppm over 25 pages of black text at the default quality. Oddly, switching to the driver's Fast mode actually slowed the performance slightly to 9ppm. Text was crisp and dark black on both settings, but not quite perfect, with a very subtle horizontal tear on a couple of lines.
Graphical prints on plain paper were excellent, with strong colours and no obvious grain or banding, but they didn't print quickly; Canon claims a 5.5ppm colour speed, but we measured just 2.2ppm over 24 pages. Photocopies seemed slow, too. A 10-page mono copy using the ADF took three minutes and 36 seconds. We waited nearly eight minutes for the same job in colour, but at least the results were good. Photos were quicker, with good quality, glossy borderless postcard prints taking a minute and a half each.

Canon's print interface uses quick settings for simplicity, but more options are available
We experienced slow scanning over a wireless connection: a 300dpi A4 scan took 51 seconds and a 1,200dpi photo scan almost four minutes. Over a USB connection the same jobs took just 19 seconds and one minute. Fortunately, scan quality was up to Canon's usual high standard.

Canon's scan interface hasn't changed in years, but it's one of the best
This MFP gave consistently very good, albeit slow, results, but its running costs should be around 6.7p per page if you use the larger of two available sizes. That isn’t the lowest cost, but it’s an excellent figure for a cheap device, which helps make the MX455 a convincing Budget Buy.

Canon Pixma Pro-100

The Canon Pixma Pro-100 is the entry-level model in Canon's Pro range of A3+ printers, aimed at semi-professional and professional photographers and printers. It uses the same ChromaLife 100 inks as many of Canon's smaller A4 inkjet printers and MFPs, which have always done well in our photo quality assessments. The Pro-100 uses eight ink cartridges, including Grey, Light Grey, Photo Cyan and Photo Magenta in addition to the usual cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks. The ‘Photo’ colours are paler versions of the standard inks, allowing for more subtle shading, accurate tones and a wider colour gamut.

ChromaLife inks are dye-based, as opposed to the pigment inks used by most serious A3+ printers such as Canon’s Pro-10 and Pro-1 or Epson’s R2000. Although dye-based ink, for a long time the default option for inkjet photo printing, lacks the longevity and anti-bleeding properties of pigment, it has its benefits. Dye-based ink, which soaks into the paper rather than leaving solid particles of pigment on top of it, tends to look brighter, smoother and glossier than pigment. This is definitely the case here, with the Pro-100’s photos immediately popping with vibrant colour at even default print settings.


While the level of fine detail and subtle shading isn’t quite as accurate as that produced by high-end pigment ink printers, our photos looked fantastic, with a glossy finish that highlighted delicate areas of contrast and really grabbed the eye. Skin tones look great and dark areas in particular appear rich and intense. The reflectiveness of the gloss finish won’t be to everyone’s taste, but our sample panel preferred it to the semi-lustre effect of the pigment-based Canon Pro-10 on the same glossy Canon Platinum Pro paper. Fine art photos, particularly in black and white, often benefit from the semi-gloss finish that goes hand in hand with pigmented ink, but if you’re looking to print bright and exciting personal snaps and posters, this printer does a brilliant job without requiring any editing or tweaking to optimise your image's colour.

Epson Stylus Photo R2000

The Stylus Photo R2000 is one of the cheapest printers in Epson's A3 range, although at £434, it still represents a substantial investment. It uses Epson's UltraChrome Hi-Gloss 2 inks and takes eight individual ink cartridges. This includes both matt and photo black, plus the usual cyan, magenta and yellow inks, with the addition of red, orange and grey cartridges.

The inks are pigment-based, which means they work by leaving particles on the surface of the paper, as opposed to dye-based inks, which are absorbed into the surface you print on. Prints made with pigmented inks typically last longer and don’t bleed, ensuring plenty of sharp detail. However, they can also look a little dull. Older types of pigment ink were susceptible to bronzing, which means that they reflected light in bands of iridescent colour that gave the photos an unnatural appearance. Epson’s UltraChrome inks suffer no visible trace of bronzing and, unlike Canon’s professional pigment inkjets, they don’t use a clear overcoat to give them a glossier finish.
Despite this lack of a sealing layer, the R2000’s prints on Epson Premium Glossy photo paper were a bit glossier than those produced by Canon’s pigment-based printers. If you want something a little more traditionally artistic, our prints on Epson’s lustre paper had a similar semi-matt quality to Canon's pigment prints.

Although it’s not suited to all types of photo, particularly monochrome ones, we really liked the finish we got from glossy papers and the way this made our pictures' colour and contrast really pop out. Default settings didn’t produce as much detail and contrast in shadowy areas as we saw in prints from Canon’s comparably-priced Pixma Pro-10, but light colours were a little brighter. Natural tones and a range of skin colours were accurately reproduced and there’s plenty of detail in all our prints. Our black and white test print was a little murky, but again highly detailed.
The R2000 can take paper sizes up to A3+. It has a primary rear paper tray with a capacity of 120 sheets of 75gsm paper, as well as a front-fed single sheet-feeder which you can fit with the supplied adaptor to connect a roll of speciality paper to the front of the printer. The printer can handle the thickest Epson-branded papers at 255gsm, while the sheet feeder can handle fine art papers of up to 1.3mm in thickness (approximately 750gsm). We found the R2000’s main rear paper feed sometimes picked up two instead of one sheet of photo paper, but jams were easy to clear and damaged neither printer nor paper.
Unlike Epson's more expensive photo printers, the R2000 doesn't have an integrated screen. This means that you have to carry out tasks such as nozzle cleaning via the options built into the driver, rather than the printer's control panel. There are a few physical controls, including a Wi-Fi button for easy connection to routers which support Wireless Protected Setup (WPS). When connected to a network via either a wired or wireless network connection, you can print from a mobile device using Epson’s Android or iOS apps. There’s also a PictBridge port, so you can print directly from compatible digital cameras.

When you're printing on plain paper, you only get to choose between draft and fine quality settings, but the driver lets you choose from five different quality settings for photos. We carried out all our photo tests at the very highest setting. It’s certainly quick, spitting out an A3 print in just five minutes and 40 seconds. Two 10x8 prints took 5m 22s and six 6x4in prints emerged in 8m 55s.
We don’t advise using this printer for plain text documents as it’s a waste of expensive ink and a very slow process, too; illustrated documents printed at 1.6ppm and mono text at 2.3ppm. The driver’s fastest print mode only improves speeds slightly and really isn’t worth it, given how jagged draft quality lettering proved to be. When printed on 100gsm paper, our text documents looked good. We particularly liked the appearance of our illustrated colour documents and, unlike similarly priced Canon A3+ printers, we encountered no problems feeding 75gsm paper through the R2000.
Epson was not prepared to disclose detailed page yield and ink consumption figures to us, so we’ve had to approximate print costs based on best-guess data derived from an older printer, the R1900, which has a similar ink system. Our photo costs are extrapolated from plain paper costs, and thus do not include accurate consumption figures for a couple of the printer's cartridges which are primarily used in photo printing.
Each 17ml cartridge costs around £16. Based on that, a page of mono text works out at 3p, while a mixed-colour document adds up to 12.4p. Including the cost of Epson Premium Glossy photo paper, a 6x4in print should cost around 45p, with the ink accounting for around 16p of that. Meanwhile, an A4 print works out at roughly £1.22 and an A3 print should cost about £2.86. Cheaper photo papers are available, but it’s important to make sure you get good quality paper for which appropriate ICC profiles are available.
Although we’re none too happy about the lack of reliable page yield data and the high estimated print costs, we can’t help but like the R2000. Its print quality is astonishingly good for the price and the option of fitting paper rolls is an extra feature that’ll appeal to some print-makers. It’s a brilliant buy if you want a pigment-based A3+ printer and comes very close to winning our Best Buy award. In the end, though, it just loses out to the vibrant colour, surprisingly low price and cheaper print costs of the Canon Pixma Pro-100.

HP Photosmart 5520

The HP Photosmart 5530 is a neat-looking and relatively low-cost option for photo printing. It has just four ink colours, and although it’s one of HP’s cheaper printers, there are individual cartridges for each. These slot into the print head, which has integrated print nozzles. The combination of individual tanks and a print head that's built into the printer rather than the ink cartridges means that you don't have to worry about replacing ink unnecessarily simply because one colour has run out or the nozzles have clogged. If the nozzles on the printer do block up, you can run cleaning cycles or, in extreme cases, get a replacement print head.

With the ink installed and the printer switched on, you're ready to configure it using the integrated touchscreen display. On-screen instructions can take you through loading paper into the surprisingly flimsy tray at the bottom of the printer. The tray lacks a cover and there's no output tray - printed pages are spat out just above the stack of fresh paper, with only a thin bit of plastic to prevent them from falling off onto the table. To our surprise, however, this worked reasonably well to keep our multi-page print jobs in order, at least up to the 20-sheet mark. Loading 6x4in paper requires you to push it a long way into the depths of the printer's input tray with only the paper guides to go on, or you can pull the tray out completely to load it. It's awkward and uncomfortable, but everything stayed properly aligned.
With both paper and ink in place, the printer will align its print heads for optimal quality. After the alignment page has been printed, all you need do it place it on the platen of the integrated scanner and the MFP will do the rest of the job itself. You can also configure its wireless connection, which is essential if you want to take advantage of HP's ePrint features to send documents to the printer via email.


When you install the drivers, you're given the option of either installing them from the disc or going online to get the latest version of the software. Annoyingly, the default software installation includes junk apps such as a Bing search bar for your browsers and software which feeds back information about how you use the product. The HP Photo Creations tool lets you use templates to turn photos into calendars and cards which you can either print or order online, but this is also of limited use. We recommend using the custom software selection option to deselect unwanted applications.
The driver has only a handful of basic settings, but if you want to configure even something as simple as borderless photo printing, you'll have to open the Advanced tab in the paper/qualities screen. This is not very pretty to look at, but there are plenty of handy options, including a greyscale printing mode and a choice of profiles in the Colour Management pull-down. We'd have appreciated a clearer layout and more information about all the options presented.

Canon Pixma Pro-1

Canon's Pixma Pro-1 is a large but surprisingly sleek-looking A3+ photo printer aimed squarely at the professional end of the market. At over £600, it's one of the most expensive A3+ printers around, although it's still a snip compared to A2 printers such as Epson's Stylus Pro 4900.

The Pixma Pro-1 uses Canon's Lucia inks which, unlike more traditional photo printing ink systems, are pigment-based rather than dye-based. Dye-based inks are designed to soak into the paper while pigment inks contain suspended crystalline particles of pigment which sit on top of the print surface. Pigment ink can display an iridescent sheen under direct light, although this is rarely an issue with the best and latest pigmented compounds. It's also popularly believed that dye-based inks produce more intense colours and subtle blending of shades, but again, technology has worked to minimise the differences. Meanwhile, pigmented inks have a proven track record of durability and faster drying times.
The Pro-1 takes 12 ink tanks, including a chroma optimiser coating that helps to seal and enhance the glossy finish of your photos. As well as the usual cyan, magenta, yellow and black cartridges, there are also lighter photo magenta, photo cyan, light grey, grey, dark grey and matte black inks to help produce a wide colour gamut and realistic shading even on challenging black and white images.
Configuring the printer is a fairly simple process. Although you can connect it to either your local network or via USB, we opted for the latter to ensure that our print times were directly comparable with other, USB-only, photo printers we've tested. Being able to connect the printer via your LAN is extremely useful, though, whether you're working from a home studio or equipping a small business or print shop, as multiple computers can all have easy access to the same device.

Whether you plan on using USB or Ethernet to connect the printer, you'll have to install drivers either from an accompanying disc or, to ensure they're up-to-date, from Canon's website. As well as a standard printer driver, there's an XPS driver which can install as an additional component. While the standard driver supports 8 bits per channel colour, the XPS one supports 16 bits per channel. Essentially, it means the printer can understand and produce a wider range of colours, assuming you're working with an image format which supports them, such as 16-bit TIFF. Not all image-editing software can cope with 16-bit colour images, while some programs require additional plugins to handle them.
Other optional driver components include Adobe RGB ICC colour profiles, which allow you to install specific profiles for different paper types, and a variety of tools to help you manage and monitor your printer's settings. These are particularly helpful, as the printer doesn't have much by way of built-in status indicators or configuration buttons.
Printing our reference A3 photo took seven minutes and 28 seconds. The result was well worth the wait, with true-to-life colour and a pleasing lustre. Six 6x4in prints emerged in 13 minutes 29 seconds and two 10x8in photos took just under nine and a half minutes. We were particularly pleased with the excellent contrast and detail visible in dark colour and true black and white prints, which clearly benefit from the Pro-1’s dedicated grey cartridges.
We occasionally ran into problems with the printer's paper feed failing to pick up even thick sheets of A3. This is an issue we've encountered with other rear-tray-loading Canon photo printers, but it only crops up here if you've just got one or two sheets of paper in the tray; a full tray produced no such problems.

The Pixma Pro-1’s print quality is nothing short of stunning. Canon's pigment inks don't have the same level of glossy sheen we've seen from other inkjets, but nonetheless produced vibrant and attractive colours. Both pale and dark low-contrast areas are reproduced with stunning accuracy, making it easy to pick out tonal shifts that are often lost amid shadows and highlights. Fine detail is absolutely stunning, too, and is at its most impressive when it appears in conjunction with delicate variations in shading. However, although professional and serious hobbyist photographers, designers and print-makers could all make an argument to justify the printer’s over-£600 purchase price, its running costs are harder to come to terms with over the long term.
Including the cost of appropriately-sized Canon Platinum Pro photo paper, a 6x4in print costs a whopping 56.4p. That’s significantly more expensive than going to your local branch of Snappy Snaps, let alone using web-based printing services, which typically charge around 5p per photo. Admittedly, the Pro-1’s photos look better than those from online services and you get hands-on control over reproduction settings, but it’s still a painful jump. However, an A4 print on the same paper will cost £1.77, while A3 prints cost £3.87, both of which prices are significantly lower than having the prints made for you. You can also save money by using Canon’s lower-cost papers – the ink-only cost of a 6x4in print is 27p. Still expensive, but not quite as painful.
While some professionals may explicitly require the massive colour gamut and fine detail of the Pro-1, its sister models are not only cheaper but also cost a lot less to run, while sharing the Pro-1’s ease of use and excellent support for heavy duty papers. For most users, we think the Canon Pro-100 hits the sweet spot between print costs, quality and ease of use, although it lacks the grey cartridges which contribute to the Pro-1’s black and white print quality, while the Pro-10 gives you almost as much detail for significantly lower running costs.

Epson Stylus Pro 4900

If you're a professional photographer or print-maker, you no longer need be dependent on third-party labs and equipment, even if your requirements are as exacting as they are ambitious. The Epson Stylus Pro 4900 is massive by the standards of any printer we’ve ever reviewed before, at 430x840x770mm. It has a full colour display which allows you to monitor ink levels and configure paper settings. It can take paper sizes of up to A2 and down to 10x8in and can handle a variety of roll papers, from glossy photo media to fine art stock. It even has an integrated cutter to slice your finished prints off the roll.

While most large format printers have only a rear paper tray, the Pro 4900's main tray is a cartridge at the bottom of the printer, capable of holding 250 sheets of 75gsm paper or 100 sheets of photo paper. When printing on A3 or larger paper, you'll have to pull the tray out and extend it to its full length. Its position and the plastic guides mean that it's possible to accidentally push your paper too far into the printer, which can cause a minor jam. However, this was the only paper feed problem we encountered at any point during testing. The printer can also handle papers of weights up to 1000gsm via its front sheet feeder.
The 4900 takes 11 massive ultra-high-capacity UltraChrome HDR cartridges with 200ml of ink in each, including both matt and photo black, plus light black and light light black for added detail in black and white images. Note that although the printer has both photo and matt black inks, the process of switching between them takes the printer a couple of minutes and expends a little ink, as both blacks share the same print head.


You also get the usual cyan, magenta and yellow, with the addition of green, light cyan, very light magenta and orange. It's an unusual combination of colours, but they contribute to the printer's claimed ability to reproduce 98% of the Pantone colour palette. If your software can create it, the odds are very good that this printer will be able to print it with complete accuracy. The 4900 can also handle 16-bit-per-channel colour spaces, as supported by professional image editing software and some digital cameras.


The inks are pigment-based, which means that they lay small particles of colour on the surface of the paper rather than soaking in like dye-based inks. While dye inks are traditionally regarded as brighter and used to be the favoured medium for subtle shading, pigments are now the industry standard for professional and semi-professional photo printing. They’re bleed-resistant, leading to ultra-sharp detail, and tests show them to have greater longevity under most storage conditions. While some pigment-based printers, notably those in Canon’s Pro range, use a clear overcoat to give a glossy finish to their photos, Epson’s pigmented inks do not require any such coating. If you print on glossy paper, you’ll get glossy prints, although we noticed that these can be inadvertently scratched if not handled with great care.
The 4000's print quality is astonishing, with brilliantly accurate colour and every bit of detail we’d hope for in our photo prints. In side-by-side comparisons at default settings, we slightly preferred the contrast and light tone reproduction of Canon’s Pixma Pro-1, but the differences are just that: differences rather than identifiable faults. Meanwhile, our glossy photos displayed brilliantly accurate colour and outstanding reproduction of subtle low-contrast details. Print speeds are impressive, with an A3 photo emerging in six minutes and 38 seconds. Two 10x8in photos printed in four minutes, 58 seconds.


We’re troubled by Epson’s unwillingness to release ink consumption figures. We were also not provided with a full set of cartridges, which would have allowed us to carry out our own run-down test. It’s obvious that the 200ml cartridges are likely to go a long way, but equally apparent that you can easily use a great deal of ink when printing even a single borderless full-colour A2 image. At £86 per cartridge, you’d certainly hope to get a fair bit of use out of a set, but we were unable to calculate even vaguely realistic yield figures based on available data.
For our purposes, the Stylus Pro 4900 represents the high water-mark of premium quality printing. Although its price of £1,787 is prohibitively expensive for even many professional photographers and print-makers, it certainly has features that will be useful to those who make a living from their prints. For the rest of us, its high quality printing provides a useful point of comparison for less expensive printers.
Both the £551 Epson Stylus Photo R3000 and the £615 Canon Pixma Pro-1 produce A3 photo prints that come surprisingly close to the quality of the Pro 4900. The R3000 even has support for some roll papers, but given the choice, we’d go for the Canon Pixma Pro-1 as the best A3+ printer to buy if your budget doesn’t stretch to A2 monsters like Epson's Pro 4900.

Canon Pixma Pro-10

The Canon Pixma Pro-10 is the mid-priced model in Canon’s outstanding range of professional A3+ inkjet photo and fine art printers. It takes ten ink cartridges with separate matt and photo black pigments, the usual cyan, magenta and yellow, paler photo cyan and photo magenta cartridges, red and grey inks as well as a chroma optimiser cartridge. This last cartridge coats your photos in a clear protective layer, which negates the tendency of pigmented inks to reflect light oddly and gives your photos a smooth, glossy finish by filling in the microscopic gaps between droplets of ink.

The addition of a grey ink tank means the Pro-10 is fairly well equipped when it comes to printing high-quality black and white photos, although it lacks the more expensive Canon Pro-1 and Epson Stylus Photo R3000’s extra pale grey tanks, which makes those printers the first choice for black and white photographers who have the money to spend.
The printer uses colour profiles to ensure the best possible results on different paper types, and we were impressed by its natural rendering of subtle colour variations. You can also fine-tune these ICC profiles to produce images that look exactly the way you want them. In common with most other professional and semi-professional pigment printers, the Pro-10’s prints lack the hyper-vivid oversaturation that’s common to many consumer photo printers, but this can result in photos that look a little dull unless you take advantage of tweakable print profiles or post-produce your photos in an appropriate manner. However, even at default settings, we loved the fine detail and broad colour range of our prints.


Print speeds are a bit slower than the printers’ more expensive sibling, the Canon Pro-1, and quite a lot slower than the similarly-priced Epson Stylus Photo R2000. An A3 print emerged in ten minutes and 35 seconds, while six 6x4in prints took ten minutes and five seconds and two 10x8in photos took 15 minutes and 10 seconds.
You can connect the printer to your PC via USB, Wi-Fi or Ethernet network connections. Unlike Epson’s A3 printers, the Pro-10 lacks a screen, so you’ll have to use the configuration utility on the supplied CD to set up your wireless connection via USB. With the printer connected to your network, you can also use Android and iOS mobile devices to print to it via Canon’s apps.


Although the Pro-10 has only two fewer ink cartridges than the Pro-1, it’s significantly cheaper to run. If you include the price of Canon’s top-grade Platinum Pro photo paper, a 6x4in print costs 34p (5p without the paper), an A4 print costs 89p and an A3 print £2.11. The various cartridges will last for between 165 6x4in photos, in the case of the clear colour optimiser, and 710 photos in the case of Magenta. Most are rated to last for around 350 6x4in prints, although the matt black and red cartridges are primarily used in plain paper printing.
The printer has a 150 sheet rear-loading paper tray. Unfortunately, like most of the current generation of Canon A3 printers, it’s not very friendly when it comes to thinner papers. It can handle all sorts of thick photo paper, fine art paper and card stock, but cheap photocopier paper doesn’t agree with it at all, causing paper jams which, although easy to clear, can be annoying. It’s not really expected that anyone will use an A3+ photo printer for documents, but if you do need to quickly print off a receipt, its plain text quality is fantastic. We had to switch to 100gsm inkjet paper to get around the paper feeding issue, though, and plain paper A4 print speeds are slow, which makes this a poor choice for document printing.
At £500, the Pro-10 isn’t as painfully expensive as the Canon Pro-1, but it’s only a little cheaper than Epson’s excellent R3000, which has better black and white printing capabilities – worth bearing in mind if your photography leans that way. If you’re more into colour, then the vast majority of users will do as well with the cheaper Canon Pro-100, our Best Buy winner, which costs less to run and around £125 less to buy.

Epson Expression Photo XP-750

Epson's A4 photo printers and MFPs usually do well in our photo quality tests, and the Expression XP-750 MFP very much lives up to our expectations. It uses Epson's Claria inks and has six dye-based cartridges: the usual cyan, magenta, yellow and black, plus light cyan and light magenta cartridges which increase the number of colours the printer can produce and so improve the subtlety of shading in photo prints.

The setup utility on the accompanying driver CD takes you through connecting the printer to your computer. You can do this either via a USB cable, by connecting the XP-750 to your local wireless network, or by using its Ethernet port for a wired network connection. We opted to make our test prints via USB to ensure that our speed test results were consistent with those of other photo printers we've reviewed. However, if you want to use Epson's mobile phone and tablet printing apps, you'll have to set the printer up on your local network before you're able to do so.
The printer has two paper inputs at the bottom of the device, underneath the output tray. Because the output tray is automated and can't be opened and closed by hand, this makes it inconvenient to access the input trays and refill them while the printer is in use. The bottom tray can take any paper size up to A4, while the tray above it is designed to take smaller paper sizes, such as 4x6in photo paper. This means that, conveniently, you can keep the printer loaded with two different sizes or types of paper at the same time. The small tray can take up to 20 sheets of photo paper, while the main one holds 100 pieces of A4.


As well as being a capable photo printer, the XP-750 is a fully-fledged photo MFP with a 2,400x1,200dpi flatbed CIS scanner which you can use to make photocopies and scan images to your PC or the MFP's built-in memory card reader. The card reader supports formats including the ubiquitous SDXC cards used by most digital cameras, as well as Memory Stick Pro-HG Duo, Compact Flash, MMCplus and MicroDrive. There's no support for xD cards, as used by older Olympus and Fujifilm cameras.
The MFP did well in our scan and copy tests, with an A4 scan speed of 32 seconds at 300dpi and 14 seconds at 150dpi. It also managed a 6x4in scan speed of 35 seconds at 600dpi and just over two minutes at 1,200dpi. A colour copy took 30 seconds and a mono one 13 seconds. Scan quality is better than we’ve come to expect from the CIS scanners built into most home MFPs, with accurate colours and good reproduction of fine detail.
A4 plain paper printing wasn't the main focus of our tests, but the XP-750 did a reasonable job. Rather than having a dedicated pigmented ink cartridge for plain paper printing, it uses the same dye inks to print on paper that it uses for photos. Letter-quality prints were dark, but the edges of letters looked at little fuzzy and some lines of text wavered a little. At draft quality, text was grey and jagged-looking. Illustrated business documents printed in the driver's text and graphics mode fared a little better: graphs and illustrations looked great, but text, particularly at small sizes, again looked a little fuzzy around the edges.
Where this MFP really excels is in photo printing. Image quality is outstanding, with great detail and particularly rich colour. This is most visible in dark areas, where black tones are deep with plenty of low-contrast detail. Some of our test images looked, if anything, a little too vivid, giving some pictures a slightly unnatural cast. Magenta tones dominate, with yellow sometimes looking a touch faded, but the overall quality of the photo prints is among the best we've seen from a standard desktop printer or MFP. It’s also worth noting that it’s easy to adjust the printer’s use of colour by tweaking the adjustment settings in the driver. The printer also supports ICC colour profiles, which you can use to ensure correct printing on third-party specialist media.


The printer is reasonably quick, printing six 6x4in photos in just over seven minutes and two 10x8in prints in around four and a half. However, it’s not particularly cheap to run, with a 6x4in photo costing 12.2p for just the ink or a total of 41.2p if you include the cost of Epson’s Premium Glossy paper. Similarly, an A4 print will cost you 48.6p in ink and £1.08 in total. Worse still, these prices are based on buying a multipack of six inks. If you buy them individually, you can expect your ink costs to be almost 14p at 6x4in and around 55p at A4. Cheaper photo papers are available both from Epson and from third-party stockists, but make sure you go for a good brand which has an appropriate ICC profile available for it.
If you make plain paper prints, you’ll pay 2.5p for a mono page and between 10p and 11p per colour page, depending on whether you use multipack ink or not. Bear in mind that, as not all inks are used at the same rate, you may have to buy individual cartridges from time to time in addition to multipack ones.
If you're after a photo MFP, then this is a good buy, but we think the cheaper single-function Canon Pixma iP7250 just takes the edge with its more natural photographic colours, better plain paper print quality and lower print costs, so is a better buy if you don't need a built-in scanner.

Epson Stylus Photo R3000

The Epson Stylus Photo R3000 A3+ photo printer takes nine ink cartridges, including three different photographic inks which help to ensure optimal performance in black and white prints: photo black, light black and light light black. By comparison, the cheaper Stylus Photo R2000 has only photo black and grey for its greyscale image production. The R3000 also has the usual cyan, magenta and yellow inks, along with light cyan and light magenta variations. There’s also a matt black cartridge for plain paper printing.

You have to manually configure the printer to use either matt black or photo black depending on what kind of paper you're printing on. The Windows driver will inform you if the printer is currently set to an ink type other than the one you've selected for your print in your application's print properties menu.
You switch between the ink types using the printer's built-in menu. This is easy to find via the integrated colour LCD screen, but we'd prefer it if the printer could change modes automatically. That said, most users will be printing either photos or matt art prints in large batches, reducing the need to constantly switch between the two. Changing ink type takes a few minutes while the ink system reloads itself and consumes some of your ink in the process.


The R3000, like most other serious photo printers, isn't designed with document printing in mind. However, it handles plain paper documents well. Print speeds are still rather slow, but quality is good and we had no trouble loading paper. There are only two quality modes available for plain paper prints: Speed (draft quality) and Quality (high quality). We recommend making all prints in Quality mode, as draft mode wasn't all that fast at 5.4ppm and produced grey text with rather jagged edges. Quality mode produced print speeds of 2.3ppm for mono text and a somewhat agonising 1.6ppm for colour prints. In this mode, both mono text and our illustrated business documents looked fantastic, but its cost and slow speed mean that the R3000 will never be anyone’s first choice for document printing.
When printing photos, you can choose from five different quality settings, but we recommend opting for Max Quality printing to ensure the best possible photos rather than attempting to save a few pennies to reduce printing time or save on ink. Print speeds are a little slow, even for a high resolution photo printer, with an A3 print emerging in nine minutes and four seconds and 6x4in photos taking two minutes and 14 seconds each. 10x8in prints took four minutes apiece.
The most obvious difference between prints from the R3000 and those from the cheaper Stylus Photo R2000 is in the R3000’s superior rendition of subtle variations in dark colours and the level of detail visible in its reproduction of low-contrast areas. Colourful tones of fruits and flowers are bright and vivid, without appearing unnatural, while black areas in our test prints looked fantastic in side-by-side comparisons with prints from cheaper Epson printers, although they weren’t quite as rich as those from similarly priced pigment ink-based Canon printers.

HP Officejet 7110

                                              The HP Officejet 7110 is an office inkjet that can print on paper sizes up to A3+ (329x483mm). It’s intended for plain paper rather than photo printing, making it suitable for producing plans, drawings and folded brochure content in-house. It’s a little larger than a typical inkjet, but it’s more shallow than many A3 printers thanks to paper input and output trays that can be retracted when printing on paper that’s A4 or smaller in size. The output tray can hold 75 printed pages, while the input tray can 250 sheets.

The Officejet 7110 has support for wired and wireless networking, and for printing from mobiles and over the internet through HP’s ePrint service. It’s also compatible with Apple AirPrint. There’s no automatic duplex (double-sided) printing, but for about £60 you can buy HP's C7G18A duplexer which simply slots into the back.


Like most network printers there's a built-in web admin interface
Aside from needing a little extra space, this is just like any other current HP inkjet to set up. However, we experienced a hesitant start to our tests, with the printer stalling in the middle of its ePrint configuration sheet (produced automatically at the completion of the setup). It eventually abandoned it altogether. After restarting both printer and computer, however, we quickly warmed to the Officejet 7110. It’s quieter than many inkjets, particularly during draft quality printing, which is often a frantic mix of whirs. It’s still fairly rapid, though, reaching almost 17 pages per minute (ppm).


Brother's print interface is great; everything you need most often is located on the main tab
At normal quality, the Officejet 7110 still managed to produce pages of text at 14.6ppm, and it printed colour sheets sat 3.8ppm. A3 printing was roughly half the speed, with the printer managing five pages of text in 54 seconds and taking two minutes 18 seconds to produce five pages of colour magazine pages.


Black text was fine for day-to-day office work, and while photos weren't too impressive they were acceptable for occasional use. Unfortunately, colour graphics were a little disappointing, with some subtle banding and colours that lacked the impact of the best plain-paper inkjets.
The Officejet 7110’s running costs work out to be 5.33p per A4 page, which isn’t bad for an all-round office printer. It's a good choice if you need occasional A3 printing in-house, but it's not ideal if you're fussy about print quality.

Brother MFC-9330CDW

The Brother MFC-9330CDW isn't particularly expensive for a colour laser multifunction peripheral (MFP), but it's got an impressive specification. This includes support for wired and wireless networks, a snappy 22 pages per minute (ppm) print speed, and automatic double-sided (duplex) printing. It's quite a smart device, too, with an uncluttered control panel that’s comprised of a colour touchscreen and touch-sensitive buttons. The touchscreen needs a firm press, but the menu system is simple and effective. We particularly like the ability to access user-configurable shortcuts with a quick swipe to the side.

Its straightforward menu makes it simple to get on a wireless network, while Brother's install program is quick and comparatively painless. The TWAIN scanner interface that it installs isn't the most comprehensive we've used, but it's simple and covers the basics well. We particularly like Brother's laser print driver, the main tab of which presents exactly the options we want for everyday jobs, with everything else we might need on the Advanced tab.


This is generally a fast device, impressively so in some areas. It even scans very quickly over a wireless networks, delivering an A4 document at 300 dots per inch (dpi) in just 23 seconds, and needing only a second more to capture a 6x4in photo at 600dpi. Photocopying is even more impressive, with single-page mono or colour copies taking 18 or 21 seconds respectively, and a 10-page colour copy completing in only 54 seconds. In mono, the same job took only 43 seconds. It delivered our black text test at 17.4 pages per minute (ppm), and our mixed colour test at a decent 10.8ppm.
The results weren't bad, but we've seen better. Black text was good, but colour graphics and photos were a little under-saturated and drab. We had a similar complaint about our scan results, which contributed to our overall impression that the MFC-9330Cdn isn’t well suited to working with colour. We also noticed that its scanner struggled to distinguish between dark shades, and while the resulting loss of detail shouldn't be a problem in the office, it wouldn't be ideal for scanning dark photos.


While much of its competition uses just four consumables, the MFC-9330CDW has four toners, a drum kit rated at 15,000 pages, and a transfer belt and waste toner unit both rated for 50,000. While this makes maintenance a little more involved, it does result in slightly lower running costs, particularly for users printing reasonably high quantities in colour. It would cost £1,275 to buy the MFC-9330CDW and print 18,000 mono and 9,000 colour pages, which is at least a couple of hundred pounds less than we'd expect in this class. A good quality office inkjet would be far cheaper, however, and would offer further savings through lower power consumption.
Overall this is a likeable, straightforward MFP that's cheaper to run than many competing laser devices. It's a good choice if you really don't want an inkjet, although we wish its print and scan quality was just a little higher.

HP Laserjet Pro M276nw

HP's Laserjet Pro M276nw is a laser multifunction printer (MFP) that lets you print, scan, copy and fax over a wireless or wired network. Instead of control buttons the M276nw has a large, responsive touchscreen through which you access functions.

Despite having a good range of features, it isn’t especially well specified. HP quotes a 14 page-per-minute (ppm) print speed in mono or colour, and neither the printer nor automatic document feeder (ADF) supports double-sided (duplex) operation. Plus, we're unimpressed by the shallow paper tray, which only holds 125 sheets, or the lack of a second paper input or bypass feed. Build quality’s decent, however, with the exception of the scanner lid’s hinges which offer no resistance. You must lower the lid with care to avoid it crashing shut.


It's easy to join this MFP to a wireless network using just its touchscreen, but we found we had difficulty connecting it to a wireless network when using HP's setup program.


In use it proved to be a disappointingly slow printer, coming nowhere near HP's claimed speeds. It peaked at just 7.5ppm when tested over our wireless network. We reconnected via USB and repeated our mono letter and mixed colour tests, achieving a faster 12.3ppm and 9.1ppm respectively. Both speeds are acceptable, but neither is especially fast. While text quality was as good as we'd expect, we were disappointed by the poor colour accuracy of all graphical prints and photos; even our black and white test photo took on a green tint.


You can monitor and administer the printer over the network using the built-in web admin interface
Fortunately we didn't see the unwelcome sharpening often evident in our tests of HP scanners. The results were very satisfactory, and were let down only by an inability to distinguish the very darkest two shades of our colour target. While mono photocopies were excellent, colour copies were cooler than the original, with a hint of green creeping into some neutral colours.


If you want to print on both sides of a piece of paper you'll have to do it manually, but at least the driver can help
Unfortunately, even when calculated for the high-capacity black cartridge, which lasts for 2,400 pages, this MFP's running costs are high, being around 12.8p per combined black and colour page. With its underwhelming colour print quality, there's no compelling reason to choose the M276nw over a competing inkjet such as one of Epson's WorkForce Pro range. We'd suggest spending twice as much on HP's own Officejet Pro X576dw inkjet. It's far faster, and you'll recoup the extra outlay through much lower running costs.

Canon i-SENSYS MF8540Cdn

The Canon i-SENSYS MF8540Cdn is a colour laser multifunction peripheral (MFP) with an ideal specification for a small firm, provided you don't need a fax machine. It can print, scan and copy in colour, and connects to your network via Ethernet; there’s no built-in Wi-Fi. Its 50-page automatic document feeder (ADF) can scan both sides of a sheet of paper, which means it can make professional looking double-sided photocopies, or turn single-sided originals into a duplex copy, saving paper.

Unfortunately, its control panel is one of the least intuitive we've encountered. Few of its buttons are labelled with text, and the icons used are baffling; the menu button looks like a speech bubble filled with a large asterisk, for example. Setup is fairly simple, but the system date defaulted to 2029 and, despite the presence of a numeric keypad, we had to use the up and down keys to change it.


The MF8540Cdn defaults to duplex printing, which will save paper. Strangely, though, this was applied to our mono letter test. Each page of the 25-page test was re-fed through the printer, but the reverse was left blank. This produced the correct result overall, but it slowed the job down. We switched duplexing off to obtain our timed results: black text was acceptably swift, at 16.5 pages per minute (ppm), while colour graphics arrived at an impressive 15ppm.


This printer produces superb text with razor-sharp outlines, and excellent graphics with a lovely glossy sheen from the toner. There was no sign of banding or other laser weaknesses. Our black and white test photo was also excellent, but colour photos exhibited exaggerated colours: skin tones were unrealistically warm and greens and blues tended toward the lurid. We had to dig deep into the print driver to find the advanced colour options, but couldn't find a setting with which we were completely happy. Similarly, while mono copies were perfect, colours in copies weren't entirely faithful to the originals.

Canon's print driver is generally well thought out ...

... but we had to dig around to find the advanced colour options, and we still weren't entirely happy with colour photos
It has a good scanner, though, paired with one of the best TWAIN scan interfaces. Scans were sharply focused with good colour and exposure control, although their 600dpi maximum resolution isn't suitable for advanced creative work.

Canon's scan interface is excellent, offering both simple and advanced modes
At 11.2p per combined (black and colour) page, this MFP's running costs are a little high. This is more the case when compared to a business inkjet such as the HP Officejet Pro X576dw, as its equivalent cost per page is around 4.2p. The MF8540Cdn has the better print quality, but the HP trounces it for pace and ease of use.

HP Officejet 7610

The HP Officejet 7610 is a relatively compact and attractive device capable of A3+ printing, A3 scans and copies and standard A4 faxes. It has both wired and wireless network interfaces, and supports wireless printing from mobile devices via Apple's AirPrint or HP's own ePrint standards. It's easy to set up, although the installer ends by asking for your postcode and an outline of how you'll use the printer; an unwelcome, unnecessary and obligatory intrusion.

HP's print and scan interfaces aren't the best we've used, as they tend to be oversimplified at the expense of functionality. Although they're fine for everyday work, potential frustrations include a lack of truly advanced options in the scan driver and the need to enter the advanced print settings to select borderless or maximum-resolution printing. The print driver's layout page also seemed unaware that double-sided printing is a £50 option: it allowed us to send a duplex print job, which then printed single-sided.

HP's print driver is a bewildering place if you want to change certain options; this 'informational' list about print resolution served only to confuse us
Fortunately the device itself is a pleasure to use, with responsive touch-sensitive controls and the ability to multitask. It can, for example, scan to a USB drive while delivering a network print job. The one slight frustration we encountered was that it automatically applied a firmware update between queued print jobs instead of waiting for a period of inactivity.

Mono print speeds were brisk, reaching a peak of 17.4 pages per minute (ppm) in Draft mode, while colour speed on plain paper was a steady 4ppm. Scans were quick even over a wireless connection, with a 600 dots-per-inch (dpi) photo captured in less than 30 seconds. We weren't surprised that photocopies took only around 20 seconds in mono or colour, but the automatic document feeder proved disappointingly slow; even a 10-page greyscale copy took two and a half minutes.

Text was dark and crisp on plain paper prints, and colours were strong and free from obvious graining. Copy quality was also above average, although there was a tendency for colours to look sombre. Scanned images were sharp and more than adequate for office work, although high-resolution images showed signs of unwelcome image processing.
Despite our complaints about HP's software, the Officejet 7610 is a good A3 MFP for small offices. It delivers strong results swiftly and at under 5p per A4 page it’s quite cheap to run. At this price, however, it's a shame that duplex printing isn't standard. The Brother MFC-J6510DW may be uglier, but it has duplex printing and it costs less.

Samsung Xpress M2875FW

Samsung's M2875FW multifunction printer (MFP) is aimed at small and home businesses. It costs not much more than an entry-level device, but is more highly specified, with a quoted 28 page-per-minute (ppm) print speed, a 40-page automatic document feeder (ADF), faxing and wireless network support.

The M2875FW has a 250-sheet main paper cassette, with a single-sheet bypass above it that’s concealed by a flap. A two-line LCD screen makes it easy to configure the printer and join it to a network without help from a PC. Our only real criticisms are that the scanner assembly can't be tilted upwards to give better access to the 120-sheet output tray, and that the paper cassette protrudes slightly from the MFP's rear when it's loaded with A4; Samsung doesn't supply a dust cover.

Samsung's lightly updated print driver remains one of our favourites, as it presents the user with a clear set of shortcuts that cover day-to-day jobs and groups more advanced options into other tabs. The printer's Eco button causes it to default all users to configurable resource-saving options, such as 2-up duplex printing, which can reduce paper use to as low as one quarter.

Samsung's clean print interface is one of the best
The M2875FW was very quick to produce high-quality mono prints, producing the first page of a job in only 16 seconds from sleep, and in 11 seconds from standby. It printed 25 pages of text in 62 seconds and took only a second longer to deliver 24 pages of graphics. Duplex printing was reasonably swift, with 10 pages printing onto five sheets in 65 seconds. Text was as good as we expect from a mono laser, but graphics were much better, with truly impressive shading that preserved contrast in very dark and very light areas. Although there was some subtle banding, we had to look quite closely to spot half-toning patterns.
We like Samsung's uncluttered, preset-based scan interface, but the custom settings and options to create or modify presets are so well hidden that we didn't spot them until after we'd conducted our timed tests. The scanner didn't return the sharpest images we've seen at 300dpi, but the results were fine for general office work. With a great printer and decent scanner we'd expect good photocopies, but the default results were far too dark, and we had to lighten them.

Initially, we couldn't see how to create or modify presets, or use custom settings in the TWAIN interface
This MFP uses a 9,000-page drum and separate toner, which is available in a 3,000-page high capacity version. With these, running costs work out at just under 1.9p per page, which is acceptable, if not quite as low as we'd like. Combining speed, quality, value and a three year collect and return warranty, the M2875FW is a good mono MFP for small firms looking to keep a lid on paper costs.

Kyocera Ecosys FS-C2026MFP+

The Kyocera FS-C2026MFP+ is far bigger and heavier than you'd expect even a business MFP at this price to be. It's also louder and smellier than most low-cost lasers, putting it firmly in the workgroup category. You wouldn't want this thing sitting on your desk and it's not as capable when you connect it via USB as it is when you use a network connection. In particular, Kyocera's TWAIN scanner driver is only designed to work over a network connection; there are some suggested workarounds to get the MFP's scanner functioning via USB, but we were unable to get any of them to work.

A properly functioning scanner isn't the only point in favour of a network connection, though. You'll also be able to use the Kyocera Mobile Print iOS and Android app to send documents to it from a phone or tablet and use the MFP's web interface to configure its core settings instead of having to go through the menu options on its five-line mono LCD display. If you're used to friendly touchscreen interfaces, navigating the FS-C2026MFP+'s menus will feel like a bit of a chore. However, they’re packed with features, including the ability to scan directly to a USB disk, Windows share or FTP server.


The scanner interface is one of the most limited we've ever encountered. Preview scans are only available if you select platen as your feed method. There are Basic, Imaging and Advanced tabs, but while many rivals' scanner interfaces give you different amounts of control over your scan settings, the options here are very limited. The only scan resolutions available are 200dpi, 300dpi, 400dpi and 600dpi. You can’t enter a custom resolution. The only options in the advanced tabs are prevent bleed-through, which seemed to be perpetually greyed out, and reverse image.
You can change the exposure and contrast settings, but that's about it. You can't even manually select a scan area from a preview, and there's no pre-set size for photos. Because of this, our quoted 600dpi photo scan time of 42s is actually for an A4 page, rather than a cropped 6x4in area. On the plus side, the duplex ADF is handy if you've got lots of double-sided documents to process or archive.


IMAGE QUALITY
Image quality from the CCD scanner was very poor. At 100% magnification, our 600dpi photo scan had an oddly pixilated look, with poorly gradated shading and contrast that made some dark tones indistinguishable from one another. Natural colours fared better, and at least our images weren't dull, but if you want to scan photos for inclusion in a business presentation, you'd be better off using a higher-quality scanner. Even our 300dpi scan of an illustrated business document, which took 20s, suffered from blurry edges around 10pt fonts.
By contrast, the printing interface is particularly good, with clear tabs that make it easy to find all the different settings you'll need, from double-sided printing to quality settings. Our mono text document printed at 22.7ppm and our colour document at 15.2ppm, but we found that, including waking up from a deep sleep, both a single colour page and a single mono page emerged in 45s. The MFP has a comparatively high idle power consumption of 26W, but after just a couple of minutes switches to a light sleep mode which consumes 9W. Waking from this mode to print either a colour or mono document took 25s.
Although the FS-C2026MFP+'s prints lack the glossy finish of those of some rivals, such as the Xerox WorkCentre 6605DN, we were generally pleased with the quality of everything it produced. Challenging shaded areas on our illustrated business documents and even photos were reproduced with great detail and accurate colours. Our 12pt mono text document looked great, but 8pt serif and sans-serif fonts looked a little scratchy and broken in places.
Copy quality is very good, although small fonts on colour copies looked slightly blurry and we had to lighten our mono copies to improve contrast on a colour illustration. While most MFPs limit you to 99 copies, the FS-C2026MFP+ can manage 999, while its duplex ADF and print engine allow you to make double-sided copies.
RUNNING COSTS
The MFP comes with 3,500 pages-worth of black toner and 2,500 pages of cyan, magenta and yellow. Replacements cost £94 for a 7,000-page black cartridge and £107 for 5,000-page colour cartridges, which leads to a mixed-colour print cost of 7.7p, with a mono page coming in at 1.3p. No other consumables are required. The MFP has a two-year warranty and its generous supply of preinstalled toner means that light users won't need to buy any more consumables over the first couple of years. It's great value for heavy and medium users, too, with some of the cheapest costs we've ever seen for a laser MFP.
CONCLUSION
Despite slightly poor print quality on very small font sizes, this is an excellent laser MFP as long as you don't need to do any more than the most basic document scanning. The Xerox WorkCentre 6605DN has better print quality and a more up-to-date interface, but the cheaper FS-C2026MFP+ has some of the best long-term running costs we've seen from any MFP. It’s a Best Buy.

Dell Studio XPS 8300

Not everyone wants their PC to look like a looming black obelisk. Although Dell's Studio XPS 8300 won't be to everyone's taste, it's compact, unassuming and reasonably quiet. It's only when we opened it up that we realised how much has been sacrificed to keep the PC small. The plain metal interior looks cheap, everything is cramped and cable routing is haphazard.

There are spare drive bays for one 5 1/4in drive and two 3 1/2in disks, but there are only two spare SATA connectors. The other two are occupied by a DVD drive and 1TB hard disk, and none supports the faster SATA III standard. The motherboard's backplate provides just four USB ports, an eSATA port, six 3.5mm stereo sockets for analogue surround sound and an optical S/PDIF output. Another four USB ports and a memory card reader are built into the top and front panels. Dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi is integrated onto the motherboard.

The PC has 8GB of RAM in two 4GB sticks, which leaves space for another two modules. There are also two PCI-E x1 slots and one PCI-E x16 slot, but all of them are occupied. The x16 slot is taken up by the graphics card, a 1GB ATI Radeon 5770, while the two PCI-E x1 slots are occupied by a USB3 card that provides a solitary port on the back panel and a Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1200 TV tuner for viewing and recording digital TV. A media centre remote control is also supplied.
This PC only comes with a 21.5in monitor, though, so you'll have to be reasonably close to watch. It looked a little dull in side-by-side comparisons with other displays, but it was evenly lit and colours looked natural. The supplied mouse is generic but comfortable, while the keyboard lends itself to swift and efficient typing.


With a score of 97 in our benchmarks, the Studio XPS 8300 fails to match the performance of other i5-2500K PCs we've tested. Although Dell has used an unlocked processor, it hasn't been overclocked and there aren't any overclocking options in the UEFI (BIOS) either, so you can't do it yourself. With a graphics card that managed 24.2fps in Crysis when similarly priced PCs are getting scores of over 60fps, there's nothing to impress us here. This is still a powerful PC that can run Call of Duty 4 with a snappy frame rate of 48.6fps, but you can do much better for your money.
Even though it's a little cheaper than most of the i5-2500K PCs we've seen, we were distinctly unimpressed by the 8300's cluttered interior and poor test scores, and we only got the price down to less than £1,000 by settling for a DVD drive, rather than Blu-ray. Even Dell's one-year collect and return warranty is outshone by some of its rivals. We prefer the Wired2Fire Hellspawn XFire.

Dell Vostro 260 MT

 
Dell's Vostro PCs are a traditional and safe bet for small and large business users, but Dell's established reputation and well-regarded warranties are a reassuring option for home users, too. The Vostro 260 looks very generic, with an extremely plain interior. It's fairly quiet, but the CPU fan makes irregular high-pitched whines that we found extremely irritating.
The version of the 260 we reviewed has a 3.1GHz Intel Core i5-2400 processor, so it's hardly surprising that it came very close to the references scores set by an i5-2500 system in our benchmark tests. It scored 95 in every test, making it more than capable of handling any application on the market.
If you want to play 3D games, you'll need to add a graphics card, as the processor's integrated Intel HD Graphics won't get you very far. We were able to play HD video and a game of Plants vs. Zombies, but our 3D titles wouldn't even run. There are VGA and HDMI outputs, so you can have a pair of monitors if you prefer a dual-headed desktop.

There are two memory slots, which are occupied by one 1GB and one 2GB DDR3 modules giving a total of 3GB. The system comes with a 64-bit version of Windows 7 Professional, so you can easily upgrade to the motherboard's maximum 8GB of memory if you replace the existing modules with larger ones. The system comes with just a 500GB hard disk, but we now expect at least 1TB from a typical desktop system, particularly at this price. There's only limited room to expand the PC's storage, with space for only one additional 5.25in drive and one more 3.5in hard disk. The motherboard has only two free SATA ports, too.
There are three vacant PCI-E x1 slots, perfect for adding USB3 or extra eSATA ports. There aren't any PCI slots, but we can't think of any important cards that are only available with that older connection standard. There's also one PCI-E x16 slot, which you can use to upgrade the system's graphics capabilities. The 300W LiteOn power supply should be able to power a modest graphics card, but it doesn't have any appropriate power connectors, so you'll need a Molex-to-PCI-E power adaptor.

There are two USB ports at the front, alongside a memory card reader that can handle almost every format we can think of. At the back, there are another six USB ports, along with a set of 5.1 analogue surround sound outputs. You'll also find mic and headphone ports at the front.
The PC comes with Dell's usual one-year collect and return warranty, plus a 15-month licence for Trend Micro's Worry-Free Business Security suite and starter version of Roxio Creator. If you're not a gamer, but are instead looking for a plain and simple PC suitable for running a wide range of applications, then the Vostro 260 MT fits the bill and wins our Budget Buy award.