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The Epson Stylus Photo R320 can do all that while being a six ink printer, and, as far as photographs are concerned they look great.

You are unlikely to buy this unit for text printing as four ink models – or better still lasers – have this covered. But I must quote some speeds for the notional ‘200 word document’ I managed 14PPM but the output in ‘draft’ looked very grey and was only really useful for checking layout. Printing a ‘real’ 1500 word document that is spread over four pages produced just over 8PPM and that same grey appearance.

Firstly size it is 50x26x23cm and weights around 6kilos. However only the 50cm width is a true figure, the 23cm height is probably closer to 29cm when paper is stored face forward in the near vertical position at the back of the printer. Finally the 26cm depth needs clearance at the back when printing on CD’s as they are inserted in the front on a special shelf and taken right through the printer so that the front edge is printed first so something like 48cm would be safe clearance.

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Let me start be mentioning printing on CD’s you need special CD’s as if you printed on normal ones the ink would never dry. These CD’s do attract a premium but they are a good deal cheaper than ‘LightScribe’ offerings and take far less time to print. The output is excellent and in full colour. Start to finish designing a CD in the special Epson software module provided to viewing the printed output could be as little as five minutes for full CD colour image providing you have images and text prepared.

Reading images from ‘cards’ is quite important for the vast amount of digital cameras around. Almost all of the popular card types are included. The printer has a text display allowing you to select images and if you have a lot on a card it also allows printing thumbnails of them so choosing the ones to print is easy. There is also a small TFT screen that can display images to enable a second check to be made. I did however find that printing four images on an A4 sheet took longer when printing direct from a card than from a PC but remember that the PC has a lot more memory and power so this should be expected.

This printer also has a standard USB port designed to take a Bluetooth adapter and using this I printed images direct from PDA’s and phones. However should you either remove the Bluetooth module (or not purchase this option) then you can plug a Pen Drive into the port and the printer reads any jpegs on it just as if they were on a ‘card’.

Not only can the R320 print borderless on 15x10cm images but also on A4 and I was more than happy with the output this six ink offering gave on both. I am not a great advocate on timings for pages produced on special papers but I know some require this information and here if these figures matter to you the Epson R320 would score very highly with an A4 borderless image taking 200seconds on Plain Paper and 335seconds on Glossy Photo Paper. Printing four images (again borderless) on a single A4 sheet was also not a lot different and the ability to do this is courtesy of another of Epson’s pieces of software that makes the basic Photo Print module in Windows XP look primitive. £129.25 for the unit without Bluetooth adapter from www.dabs.com/uk/Search2/Product+Details.htm?quicklinx=3PFL&searchphrase=r320 

Or for full specifications etc check the link below

http://www.epson.co.uk/products/inkjet_printers/product_spec/Stylus_Photo_R320.htm