Epson R325 Detailed Information & Reviews

This printer is amazing!

I work in an office equipment company and I have being looking at this printer on the shelf for a little while wondering what my partner would say if I bought it!! Then I had the perfect opportunity as my printer at home my Epson c66 broke and so I happily took this one back from work.

The machine takes 6 cartridges black, magenta, cyan , yellow, light cyan and light magenta. The 'light' cartridges are what give the photos that extra quality compared to using just the 4 usual ones. The cartridges are also not very expensive compared to that of Lexmark and HP and although there are 6 you use less magenta and cyan than usual as they are coming from the light ones also.

I recommend any machine that takes multiple cartridges. It is a lot more economical as you just replace the colour that you use. For example on holiday you may take a lot of photos with the sea and sky in the background which means when printing them you will use a lot of the cyan cartridge. With the printers that use a single colour cartridge with the 3 colours in one if you run out of cyan you have to replace the whole thing even if you have barely touched the magenta and yellow which isn't cost effective. Where as with the separate colour cartridge machines like this one you can just replace the cyan saving you a lot of money.

I mostly use my printer for photographs as I am very snap happy. And the quality of the photos on this machine is absolutely incredible. They look exactly like photos you would get developed but only better as you can edit them first on the screen. You get the best results if you use appropriate paper, I recommend the Epson premium glossy photo paper which you can get in A4 or 4 x 6.

The machine also has a tray you can insert so you can print directly on to CD's and DVD's which is extremely handy. You have to buy particular CD's and DVD's which hare printable but this are not really any expensive than normal ones. I will warn you though that in my experience they take about 12 hours to dry which is fine if you don't need to do one quickly, I usually leave mine overnight to dry.

This printer also has slots for memory cards so that you don't even have to turn your computer on to print photos as you just insert the card and look through your photos on the LCD screen and print the ones you wish to. This is handy though the screen is a little small so you cant really see the quality of the picture very well. I prefer to put it on the computer first to see if they are blurry and the lighting is right so that I don't waste any paper on unnecessary prints though for a quick print it is ideal.

Also for quite a small printer it has an incredible printing speed.

An excellent little machine that I would recommend to anyone. It is also very reasonably prices. The new R340 is out now but from what I have heard it is not too much different but is about £45 more expensive and seeing as you can still get this model (R325) from a fair few places it is the best option.

** Please not to all Epson users with Epson printers please do not take cartridges out of your machine and put them back in again. the Epson cartridge are cheaper because they don't include the printer head which is built in to the machine unlike the HP's for example. It may be fine but often you will get an air bubble in the cartridge which could affect your prints or even ruin the machine. **

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Epson's latest entry into the photo printer market helps fill the gap between its R800 and R200 models with an update of the R300. The Epson Stylus Photo R325 comes complete with a new, colour screen and memory card slots for 13 of the most popular card formats, including xD, Smart Media, Memory Stick - Pro, Duo, Pro Duo and Magic Gate - SD and mini SD cards, writes Doug Harman.

The R325's blend of features includes direct-print capability using its memory card slots; USB Direct Print and PictBridge compatibility; CD and DVD printing; and, to cap it all, stunning photo output that's well able to rival that of the R325's bigger sibling, the R800.

Six separate ink tanks house the printer's cyan, magenta, yellow, black and photo cyan and photo magenta primaries. Setup is fairly easy with all the printer's articulations for the feeder and delivery trays built into the curvy, grey and silver body. However, I had a few issues with the installation process. The driver failed to install completely the first time round and the second left me with odd, intermittent faults where the driver wouldn't load in Photoshop. Another, third installation later, I had cured these ills, but it meant it had taken me around three hours to go from opening the box to printing a proper photo.

That aside, the R325 struts its stuff well: a borderless, A4 photo-print using the printer's optimised 5760dpi output took around 13 minutes to drop onto the delivery tray.

The direct, computer-less printing is straightforward thanks to a neat but very small, 1.4in colour display that allows you to crop and print using a range of various layouts and styles. These are selected from an additional mono LCD data-readout below the colour screen and just above some simple, easy to use controls on the printer's top.

The attachment for handling inkjet-printable CDs and DVDs is a touch flimsy but works well enough, and to cap the ensemble, the memory card slots cans also be used to upload images to a connected computer