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08/08/2004 |
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Epson Stylus Photo RX600 Printer/Scanner Iain Laskey is Impressed with Epson’s new RX600
Epson’s latest combo combines a scanner, card reader and printer into an eye catching silver and dark grey package. Unlike many of its peers, the RX600 can be used without a PC and is in effect an all in one digital media mini-lab. Inside the Box The Epson RX600 bundles the unit itself along with a slide adaptor and a raft of software. Installation is straight forward although we thought it was odd that the front panel was supplied separately. This needed to be clipped on but felt flimsy and could easily be pulled off again. A strange design decision on an otherwise well built unit. Standalone The RX600 can act like a colour (or B&W) photocopier. It can print pictures from prints, negatives or any of the standard digital media cards. You can adjust the images contrast, brightness saturation and sharpness as well as select printing with additional information such as the shooting date. The front panel contains a colour LCD panel which can be tilted to suit your viewing angle and is used to display photos and menu options. The rest of the front is taken up with a number of buttons for accessing the various functions. Underneath the panel is the card reader which can handle most common card formats. We tested it with 128Mb and 256Mb Compact Flash cards and it worked fine. The RX600 also allows scans to be made to a memory card if desired.
An unusual feature is a front mounted USB socket. This allows you to connect external devices such as CD writers, hard drives or ZIP drives which can be used to archive images. Scanning is done at a maximum of 2400dpi. We scanned in several photos, magazine pages and slides (the latter at the full 2400dpi) and founds the results to be very good indeed. The scanner also has dust and scratch removal implemented via software. A dedicated slide scanner would produce better images but for all but the most demanding, the RX600 will produce pleasing results. Special Features A neat trick is the ability to produce contact sheets from a memory card or other source which you can then mark with a pen to indicate the ones you want. When the contact sheet is placed on the scanner, the RX600 uses the pen marks to work out which prints to make. Very funky and very useful indeed. Running costs ought to be reduced by the use of six separate ink cartridges. Rather than throw away a whole colour cartridge if just one colour has run out, you only have to replace a single colour. You can happily print out all those pictures with blue skies without worrying so much. The RX600 supports an optional Bluetooth adaptor as an additional connectivity option. Photographers will appreciate the PictBridge and USB DIRECT-PRINT support, assuming the use of a compatible camera. We used a Canon EOS 300D digital SLR in our tests and tried prints with and without these modes being enabled and the results were marginally superior when enabled. Quality As noted, scanning is very good and reasonably quick although the adaptor only allows for 4 slides or 8 negatives at a time. Epson really ought to have included an 8 slide adaptor; after all it’s just a plastic sheet. When scanning you can go with either an automatic mode which identifies the type of document or film being scanned or a more manual mode with lots of additional adjustment options. The print resolution of 5760dpi combined with the 6 separate ink cartridges produces very good photo prints. Epson claim longer lasting prints with their new ink formulations. However, one of the benefits of home printing is the ease of running off another copy if a picture starts to get a bit sun-bleached. You can of course use it for normal printing duties. We tried a few web pages and some documents and they all looked fine although all printing could have been faster. Canon has recently raised the bar in ink-jet print speeds and Epson have a bit of catching up to do here. The paper tray at the back can hold a good sized stack of paper. Software The RX600 comes with a fistful of software titles. As well as Epson’s integrated software for managing scanning/copying/printing tasks, you also get ArcSoft PhotoImpression and Greeting Card Creator, ABBYY Finereader OCR and more. Conclusion Photographers are clearly the target market. If you want an all in one unit that covers all your scanning, copying, printing and archival needs then the Epson RX600 is the unit for you. The quality of printing and scanning are both top notch and the ability to do so much without going near a PC or Mac is commendable. For extra peace of mind an extended 3 year warranty is available. This is one piece of kit I’m genuinely sorry to see going back to the manufacturer.
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