We’re not at all happy with Epson’s unwillingness to reveal print costs, though, especially given that, by all appearances, this printer is likely to be expensive to run. Although the £500 Canon Pixma Pro-10 renders dark tones with greater depth and subtlety, the R3000’s dynamic rendering of bright colours as well as its glossier finish on appropriate papers will appeal to many users. The Stylus Photo R3000 is unquestionably one of the best photo printers you can buy, and it’s priced accordingly, at £551.
In a similar vein, an A4 print including paper should come in at around £1.49, with an A3 print costing £3.41. Including Epson Premium Glossy photo paper, a 6x4in photo is likely to cost around 52p, with 22p of that cost made up by ink. Meanwhile, the combined ink costs of a page of mixed-colour printing should be around 18p. With each cartridge priced at around £24, we estimate the cost of a page of mono A4 text at 4.7p – a very good reason to use a different printer for text documents. Even though the R3000 doesn’t have a clear overcoat cartridge such as those used by Canon’s pigment-based inkjets, we were pleasantly surprised by the glossy finish of photos printed on Epson’s Premium Glossy paper, while those printed on lustre paper had a more traditional semi-gloss art print look.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 data derived from an older printer using a similar ink system, in this case the Epson Stylus Photo R2800. Pigmented inks tend to result in sharper, more durable photos, but can also look a little dull. The R3000 uses pigmented inks, which lay particles down on the surface of the page, rather than soaking in like dye-based inks. 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. I know the 960 was an 8' printer and the R1800 a 13' printer, but the R3000's increase in size seems as significant as going from the 960 to the R1800. 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. Product Information Photo printing, Dedicated photo Memory card slot, No Print colour, Colour Number of colours including black, 9 colour Colour print. Now, I've gone through a Stylus Photo 960 to a R1800 to this, and each time there's been a significant increase in size. 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. 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. 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. Quality mode produced print speeds of 2.3ppm for mono text and a somewhat agonising 1.6ppm for colour prints. 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. There are only two quality modes available for plain paper prints: Speed (draft quality) and Quality (high quality). Print speeds are still rather slow, but quality is good and we had no trouble loading paper. However, it handles plain paper documents well. The R3000, like most other serious photo printers, isn't designed with document printing in mind.