Epson rolls out two low-cost photo ink jet printers

Epson today rolled out two new six-color photo printers, the Epson Stylus Photo R220 and R340 (shown at right). Both printers offer better color saturation for brighter reds and yellows, and automatic image enhancement for adjusting a photo that is too dark when a subject is backlit. Additionally, both printers can print directly onto the surface of ink jet printable CDs and DVDs, and can print from the center to the edge of a CD or DVD with no visible blank space. The Epson Stylus Photo R220 offers 5760 x 1440 optimized dpi (dots per inch) using ultra fine ink droplets as small as three picoliters. The R220 also provides "BorderFree" printing in frame-ready sizes such as 4 x 6-inch, 5 x 7-inch, 8 x 10-inch, and 8.5 x 11-inch, and can print a 4 x 6-inch lab quality borderless photo in as little as 57 seconds. The R220 uses individual ink cartridges, and is available for $100, while the R340 is priced at $200.

The Epson Stylus Photo R340 is a PC-free printer that incorporates a 2.4-inch LCD preview monitor making it possible to select, crop, and print photos in full color without a connected computer. The R340 features an intuitive control panel with simple on-screen menus, providing selections such as paper type, paper size, and number of copies. A new "print by date" option that finds photos by the date they were taken. The panel also provides views of photos with or without on-screen text, enables viewing and selecting of photos using thumbnails, and enables selection of a range of photos for printing. The R340 prints black documents at 15 ppm (pages per minute), and offers frame-ready borderless images like its counterpart, the R220. The device can also save images to an external CD-R, Zip drive, or Flash memory drive. The R340 supports printing directly from Bluetooth-enabled phones, the Bluetooth adapter is priced at $70.

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