Epson surecolor p600
Roll your own photo prints with Epson’s range-topping A3+ printer
£570, $790
like the Canon Pro-10s, this Epson is a fully-fledged, pro-grade pigment printer. Aiming for top-quality black & white as well as colour output, the nine separate cartridges contain no less than four black and grey inks. As with the Canon, there are both ‘photo’ black and matte black cartridges. This time, however, they share a channel in the print head, so each time you switch between glossy and matte, you need to purge the channel of ink and replenish it with the alternative type. This can take over five minutes to complete and wastes ink in the process.
A plus point of the P600 is that it comes complete with a roll feeder, something that’s not even available as an optional extra with the Canon A3+ printers. It enables you to buy photo paper in rolls and create prints with aspect ratios that exactly match your requirements, even stretching to panoramic prints. The printer incorporates a 2.7-inch touchscreen, again absent in the Canon A3+ printers. High-capacity cartridges are a good match for large-format printing, containing nearly three times as much ink as for the XP-960, and about twice as much as for the Canon A3+ printers.
performance
On glossy paper, prints look rather less smooth than from the Canon Pro-10s pigment printer, but are still quite acceptable. Colour accuracy is excellent and black & white prints on matte media look magnificent. Even in this respect, however, the Canon Pro-10s has the edge, with marginally better lowlight definition.