Epson Stylus Photo 1400 Inkjet Printer Inkjet

The old Epson 1290 printer had teething troubles - ink leakage being the even worse - that have been in the course of time overcome and all those improvements have been carried on up to the latest picture 1400 and married with brand-new, finer publishing technology. Therefore, for the £299, exactly what can you get?

Specifications

• Print mind: Epson small piezo point mind of 540 nozzles (90 nozzles per magenta, cyan, yellow, light magenta, light cyan and black colored)
• Droplet dimensions: 1.5pl
• Ink type: Epson Claria photographic ink
• Quality: as much as 5760x1440 optimised dpi on suitable news utilizing RPM (Resolution Performance control)
• Speed: 8x10in image cycle image on A4 dimensions - 111 seconds
• Interface: USB 2.0 (Hi-Speed)
• Paper size: A3+ A3, A4, A5, A6, Letter, Legal, B5
• Cartridges: Cyan, Ebony, Yellow, Magenta, Light Cyan, Light Magenta
• Cartridge costs: £9.92 each
• Additional publishing: Manual CD/DVD publishing slot
• Margins: 3mm standard all round, borderless via printer motorist.
• Proportions: 22.3x61.5x31.4cm (h, w, d)
• Noise: 47dBA (per ISO 7779)

The key printer motorist menu allowing use of high quality, dimensions and orientation features.

Construction
For a printer down within basic level of this Epson range, you receive a big slab of machinery for your cash. It's big and black colored and when the sheet feeder the top is extended, in addition to result tray sticks its tongue away, you might be occupying almost a meter of table room. What's good is the fact that the feeder is solid and fixed toward printer. It flips away and then runs in 2 phases, depending on the size of the report being used. This is often everything from B5 as much as A4 and A3+, the oversize variation.

Controls regarding the front side for the printer tend to be strictly restricted to being the on/off, cartridge replacement and forced report feed/cancel print. You can find six ink cartridges in a big printing mind, within the standard CMYK range, but incorporating light cyan and light magenta. This is certainly to offer better graduation on skin tones and skies. Professional image A3 printers usually offer even more cartridges, but comparable priced Canon A3+ printers only use four, and this is okay. The price of the cartridges is costly at £9.93 a pop, and after printing just 10 A3 sheets we been able to use up the light cyan tank, get just over halfway through both magentas and made a critical reduction regarding yellow, black colored and cyan cartridges. So, fortunately that one can change cartridges individually, however the bad development is that you'll be doing it with a few regularity.

Performance
Most of the activity whenever publishing occurs aided by the motorist that embeds it self in to the system once set up. Whenever activated for printing, clicking on Properties brings up the first batch of options, like just what the standard should always be from either five. Right here the dimensions, paper type and borderless options are selected, alongside direction. There is also a graphical display showing the ink amounts. At this point you can just print the image, but clicking on Advanced brings up much more options.

Here the upkeep options may be chosen to clean out the print mind and half the options from past display tend to be duplicated. In addition, and a lot of interestingly, it now reveals the color administration choices. You can find three initial choices: Colour Controls, PhotoEnhance and ICM. Selecting Colour Controls raises more color modes to select from, namely Epson Standard (enhance contrast), Epson Vivid (increases blue/green) and AdobeRGB (uses that colour profile space). Whichever of those is selected, the brightness, comparison, saturation and CMY colour components could all be adjusted.

The PhotoEnhance choice is another of Epson's generating and permits the image to-be auto-corrected, well toned also to smooth epidermis tones. That simply leaves ICM which is short for Image Colour Management, the Microsoft windows system for standard color administration. It's already been superceded by Windows Colour program (WCS) on Microsoft windows Vista, but it is not supported here. Anyhow, choosing ICM enables the usage of input pages so if the picture ended up being saved with sRGB or AdobeRGB you are able to specify that to be utilized. The rendering intents address exactly how these pages are then transformed into be utilised by the printer, which is a CMYK product naturally. You can find after that several printer profiles accessible to utilize. To streamline matters, if Epson Standard is chosen after that it assigns a specfic profile in line with the paper stock that has been chosen. There are ones per types of paper that Epson sells, so theoretically this will provide relatively precise results.

The higher level properties selection enables making use of pages for various report shares.

This is the concept anyway, in practice publishing things out of the gloss report provided came up with a slight green color cast, that was noticeable into the shadows and on epidermis tones. And this ended up being using Epson's very own profile the paper that has beenn't impressive. Picking color settings without ICM, and indicating AdobeRGB for the production, as file had been saved thereupon color space, created a magenta color cast. Epson likewise have a Premium Glossy report therefore I wish that works well much better than the standard shiny. It could really do because Premium semi-gloss report produced much more precise outcomes, with much better colours, in both ICM and ordinary AdobeRGB settings, though once more, on monochrome, that has been a tremendously, extremely slight green cast.

Across all paper stocks the advantage of having an additional cyan cartridge is obvious in sky shots with plenty of graduation from deep-blue to vibrant cyan heavens. Today, one way around colour casts if problem is originating from over-production for the cyan and yellowish inks, when it comes to green, is always to printing in greyscale, just using the black ink tank. In the shiny paper this made no huge difference after all, so it's much more likely down to the paper stock. Printing mono on the matt paper produced much lighter results, without comparison, anytime fine tonal graduation in mono, without deep shadows, is what you are after after that that's the paper stock. Usually, once more, semi-gloss produced a far much better mono print, though with this there was an ever therefore small color tone to a pure mono result.

Speedwise, the Epsons have never already been fast and also this is unquestionably the truth right here. The advertised speed is a 10x8in picture on A4 report, so not making use of all of it, in 111 moments, or almost two moments. Today, this will be an extremely worthless claim since the entire point of an A3 printer should print in A3. Printing out 250dpi pictures at full A3 size took around 8mins 45secs everytime that will be fairly pedestrian.

Taking a look at the detail in picture, it's all-present and correct, which 1.5pl droplet dimensions, compared to 2pl in Canon house range A3s, means details are represented well.

Verdict
There are plenty of options within the printer motorist, crucially including people in order that non-Epson papers that include unique profiles - like art work papers - can be used for most useful results. The outcome making use of three different sorts of Epson's very own reports therefore the pages per one, had been extremely different. The shiny report ended up being honestly bad, nevertheless the Premium semi-gloss plus the matt paper (within specific variables) were fine with loads of detail and great tints. The speed had been barely hare-like but at least it was really quite. Therefore peaceful in reality that the 1400 must be closely scrutinised to be able to determine it was indeed working rather than slacking. As an alternative the renowned 1290 workhorse line, this is a good quality printer but WCS-compatible motorists for Vista people and much better pages would be valued.

Positive factors:
As much as A3+ documents
Excellent construction
6-cartridges to minimise expenses
1.5pl droplet size for extremely depth
Really quiet
Deep colours
Direct publishing to CD/DVD

Minus points:
Results differ even on Epson papers