Epson Stylus Photo R340

Print your snaps at home with this six-cartridge photo printer

Printing photos at home has created fierce competition between printer manufacturers, with prices tumbling as features soar. This photo printer from Epson costs less than £150 and includes all the functions a home-printing digital photographer might want.

Features
There are two ways to print with this device: either via your PC or direct from your camera. If you have a PictBridge-compatible camera you don’t need to have your PC turned on – just connect the camera to the printer and find the photos you want from the printer’s built-in screen. Even if your camera isn’t PictBridge compatible you can stick your memory card straight into the included card reader, which can read images from Compact Flash, Secure Digital, Memory Stick, xD or SmartMedia cards. As well as printing on standard paper an adapter is also supplied to let you print straight onto blank CDs to give them a professional finish.

Performance
The printer is fast and quiet. Turn your head back to your PC while you’re printing and you’d hardly notice it was doing anything. The results are good too, offering bright, vibrant photos on Epson’s own photo paper. This is helped by its six-colour system, which has lighter shades of cyan and magenta on top of the usual cyan, magenta, yellow and black colours, for more subtle photo shading. Each colour is stored in individual ink cartridges (costing sround £10), which means you can get 100 per cent efficiency out of them without having to throw away a half full cartridge just because one of the colours has run out.

Ease of use
Using the printer is simple, whether you’re printing with your computer or not. From the built-in screen we found it easy to get good results, choosing options like borderless printing and changing paper sizes without having to think too hard about it. From your PC it’s even easier, with well set out print menus that integrate smoothly with Windows to ensure your software printing tasks are completed seamlessly.

Value for money
For what you get this is great value for money. You could get the screen, direct printing and memory card reader functions on rival printers for less, but the addition of the economic individual cartridge printing should make this better value in the long run, especially if you print a lot of pictures.