#Epson stylus photo r3000 reviews full#

I switched from Photo Black ink to Matte Black, then back to Photo, and then back to Matte again. Over the following hour and a bit I printed on glossy paper via the regular paper feed, on watercolour textured paper using the Fine Art paper loading tray, on photo board using the dedicated thick board/CD/DVD feed input, and created a panoramic print on canvas using the clip on roll feed attachment (although the R3000 doesn't have a built-in cutter it prints a fine grey line as a handy cutting guide). Printing with the Epson Stylus Photo R3000 For the rest of us though, the difference is there, if somewhat negligible. If this is how you choose to view your images, then the R3000 is definitely head and shoulders above the R2880. Blocks of colour appear just a little smoother with the smaller droplet size, but you only see a real difference if you start looking at your prints through a microscope.

#Epson stylus photo r3000 reviews full#

You would be hard pushed to tell the difference between a full quality print made from 3.0pl droplets and one from 2.0pl droplets, but if you compare the two side by side, there is a tiny, subtle difference. Now, you could be forgiven for wondering if a millionth of a millionth of a litre's difference in droplet size is really going to make that much of a difference, and the short, slightly disappointing but ultimately honest answer to that is no, not really. The size of the droplets the R3000 puts onto the paper are 2.0pl, compared to 3.0pl from the R2880. So, in other words, a picolitre is small - very, very small. A picolitre is one millionth of a microlitre, which in turn is one millionth of a litre. The picolitre (pl) measurement shows how small the droplets of ink are that the printer puts onto the paper. Photo Black (PK) and Matte Black (MK) inks 2.0pl droplet size But if there are some aspects of printing that you are worried about, be that loading a particular type of paper, printer maintenance such as head cleaning, or choosing which black ink to use on which paper (more about that later), the Epson R3000 takes all the stress away by holding your hand and taking you step-by-step through the operation on its built in LCD screen. The Epson R3000 is an easy, straightforward and uncomplicated printer that just about anybody will be able to use to get great photographic prints. Epson’s range of Fine Art media is particularly good, so the fact that the R3000 makes it so much easier to use them is a big thumbs-up. This is a far less complicated way of handling Fine Art papers and it doesn’t require the user to clamber over the back of the printer to try and load thick or textured paper. The front loading tray is popped down, the paper loaded and spooled into the printer before being returned through the usual printer path. The Epson R3000 addresses this by providing a much more convenient front loading Fine Art paper path. The downside of this arrangement was always that it meant pulling the printer away from the wall and required a fiddly paper loading process. These loading slots have provided a straighter paper path for the Fine Art media, meaning there is less chance of the thicker or textured papers being damaged as they are spooled through the printer. Previous incarnations of Epson's desktop A3+ printer (including the R2880) have been equipped with a separate paper loading slot at the rear of the printer for Epson range of fine art papers. As the R2880 is already a well established and much respected printer, it seems important to establish what extra the R3000 offers early on. One of the first things that Epson was keen to point out is that the R3000 is an accompaniment to the existing R2880 printer and not a replacement for it. But that’s not important – on to the printer! In the blue corner.Įpson UK’s HQ looks like the offices of a high-tech company – there’s lots of glass, metal, brightly coloured soft furnishings, and they have trees growing indoors. Frankly, it’s amazing that they’ve had the time to create the R3000, but they have, and I got to try one out at Epson’s HQ near Hemel Hempstead a full month before its official release. Since then Epson has been the first manufacturer to put a colour printer into space (the Stylus 800), become the biggest selling printer brand in the UK, and has also had time to create the world’s first quartz watch, manufacture screens for mobile phones, create robots for the assembly lines of all kinds of hi-tech products, and become the number 1 manufacturer of digital projectors. The R3000 is the latest A3+ desktop printer from the Epson printer maestros and reflects just how far things have come in the world of home printing - certainly a long way since their EP-101 was created in the 1960s.