31 January 2008 11:00 GMT / By Doug Harman

The Stylus Photo 1400 is a well made beast with a silver and black livery that makes for an attractive package and while in use its bulk means it leaves a fair sized footprint, its articulated and telescopic feed and delivery trays mean its neat when shut and not in use.

The printer’s front panel folds down to reveal the access for printing CDs and DVDs while just three buttons grace the right side of the machine, one each for power, paper feed and cartridge replacement. You also get a PictBridge port for direct connection of PictBridge-enabled cameras and a USB 2.0 and power socket feature on the back of the machine.

The printer uses six separate Epson Claria ink cartridges; the four “normal” inks of cyan, magenta, yellow and black plus a light cyan and light magenta are used too. Inks clip quickly and easily into place in the large print head and once there and the printer is shut, ink priming starts immediately.

Set up is fast and you get Epson’s Creativity Suite software to tinker with as well as the print utility and printer driver on CD. You can print on media from 6 x 4-inch (10 x 15cm) enprint size up to the maximum A3+ size and you can print everything from top quality photos to more usual plain paper text documents.

Once up and running the 1400 soon reveals the first of the improvements over the 1290, while not being particularly fast compared to some of the Canon and HP competition, it is still much faster than the 1290 with an A3 plain paper print with text taking just under a minute to print from pressing “print” to the paper arriving completed on the output tray.

Printing a top quality borderless 6 x 4-inch photo takes a couple of seconds shy of 2 minutes, so not particularly fast but an A3+, top quality borderless print took 12-minutes on my G5 iMac setup. While the dye-based inks tended to feather (but only very slightly) when printing text on plain “office” paper, colour graphics on plain paper were better. But as soon as you put in top-quality paper such as Epson’s Premium Glossy Photo paper and switched the printer into its advanced print mode (you get a basic and an advanced control option in the driver), the quality that this printer can achieve becomes quickly apparent. It is simply excellent.

The Epson Stylus Photo 1400 looks a little pricey but can be bought online for a lot less than the RRP price quoted here. And it may not be the fastest printer on the block either, but it certainly improves on the popular Epson Stylus Photo 1290 and can provide stunning photo prints.

Verdict

A bit slow perhaps, but the Epson Stylus Photo 1400 still produces stunning photo prints making it an ideal choice for those requiring larger than A4 photo output.

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Review Recap

Made by

Epson

Price as reviewed

£299

The good

Ease of use and set up, fast, near laser quality text, borderless photos

The bad

Not as fast as claimed, some fuzziness on text, dithering patterns visible in lower quality (read faster) print modes

Quick verdict

Epson’s Stylus Photo 1400 replaces the popular Stylus Photo 1290 and offers up a range of improvements to that model and while it may not be a small model, it’s well made and the dye-based output is excellent

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