Epson SP1400 A3 printer

According to Epson, the Stylus Photo 1400 is a replacement for the once popular but now antique SP1290. It uses a dye-based ink process – ‘Claria’ – rather than the pigment inks found higher up in the range. These new inks mean that prints should last longer than those made on an SP1290. Epson is quoting 200 years “under album conditions”, but a more useful quote of longevity under glass isn’t given. Based on Epson’s figure we’d guess 20-50 years.

Physically the SP1400 is a standard bread-box unit. There’s no roll feed and no roll-feed option, but it does come with a CD tray and the usual CD full of software, which includes an HMTL user guide and CD and photo print utilities. Installation was simple and trouble-free, and if you want to save some disk space you can choose not to install the extras. Inside the unit are slots for six cartridges – two red/magentas, two blues, one yellow and just the one black. These are cleverly tabbed so they can’t be fitted into the wrong slot. Less impressively, they’re A4- rather than A3-sized, which suggests that this printer won’t be cheap to run – a point we’ll come back to.

Our initial prints were way off, with a wild magenta cast. Colour eventually settled down to give excellent results, but when we torture-tested the printer by trying to duplicate a faded B&W print with a sepia undertone, the printer added a slightly blotchy effect that we couldn’t totally eliminate. Bizarrely, the printer was using magenta and cyan exclusively, and no black. It took an entire pack of paper to get the exact shade we wanted and by the time we’d finished our test, half of both of the cartridges had been used. This is very worrying on an A3 printer using A4 paper with around 50 per cent coverage – it suggests you’ll get 40-80 prints per ink set, which is disappointing. The good news is that ink sets are relatively cheap. The street price is around £40 and there are some good multi-pack deals available. So ink swapping doesn’t necessarily mean wallet pain, although we’d still have preferred some bigger carts for the convenience.

Overall, we were slightly underwhelmed by the SP1400 as a photo printer. It can produce some very bright, punchy colours with a wide gamut, but it also seems temperamental. Colour isn’t quite accurate enough to be used for proofing, and black and white performance seems hit and miss, so we wouldn’t recommend it for a digital darkroom. But if you want something that’s going to produce bright and colourful photo prints and business graphics, it’s affordable and has a lot to offer.