Epson Stylus Photo RX610

The EPSON Stylus Photo RX610 is an all-in-one inkjet printer. All-in-one in this case means: a printer, a copier, and a scanner.

The RX610 is primarily aimed at users who want to print digital photos, which it does, with extraordinary quality, but with one drawback, costs. This review covers all the features the RX610 has to offer, but will focus on a quality and cost comparison, between a professional photo lab and that of the RX610.

Let’s cover the basics first:

Speed:

The Epson inkjet printer has a print output speed of 37 pages per minute for pure black text documents. Our test brought the speed down to around 20 pages per minute, considering these pages where full colour text/graphic documents. High quality photographs took about two minutes to print.

It’s not the fastest printer on the market, but by all means not sluggish.

Print Quality:

The text quality from this unit is very sharp on plain paper. Small text and bolded text came out clear and perfectly readable. On glossy photo paper, the prints look like they have come from a pro shop, incredibly good contrast ratios, sharpness, and colours.

A really great feature is the borderless printing, one which is vital when using this machine as a primary digital photo printer. Surprisingly the borderless printing works on all basic photograph sizes, these being: 4×6″, 5×7″ and A4.

Scanner:

The built-in flatbed colour image scanner has a scanning resolution of 1200×2400 dpi. The scanning quality showed some lack of contrast, but excellent amount of fine detail. The tests ranged from scanning a passport, a photograph, and a basic text document, all with a solid outcome.

Copy:

The copy functionality had the same outcome, with low contrasts but great image details. Via the easy menu functionality, one can choose for the copy to be printed directly, or sent to a memory stick to keep as a digital copy. Digital copies can be stored via the various memory readers, ranging from CompactFlash, xD and SD cards.

Drivers:

The RX610 comes with Win 98SE/Me/2000/XP/XP x64/Vista, Mac OS 10.2.8 or 10.5 drivers – the installation on my Mac took a couple of minutes and was completely hassle free. The printer worked within minutes of installing the drivers.

Menu / Navigation

The printer has a built-in 2.5 inch colour LCD screen which is used to change the settings, and photos to be viewed. The screen’s output however is very poor and quite dark, and just about good enough to distinguish which photo it is showing.

Digital Photo Printing:

The quality of images that the RX610 pushes out is excellent. This exceeded my initial expectation and made photo printing quite a fun exercise, an addictive one at that, since I hardly print my images.

Having such a high quality printer at hand would definitely make me print more images, however, could my wallet sustain such a habit?

The problem with the RX610 (as with so many other printers) is the cost, not of the actual unit, but of the print cartridges. The RX610 uses six (yes, 6) different print cartridges - cyan, magenta, yellow, black, light cyan and light magenta…each with a price tag of R140.00. So a new set of cartridges would costs you: R860.00. That’s 1/3 of the price of the actual unit, which retails for R2199.00…

The idea is to actually make printing more cost-efficient, by optimising ink usage and eliminate wastage as you replace only the ink cartridge that runs out. However, it’s heavy on the ink when printing out photographs.

Let’s compare the price of printing with the RX610 and a professional printing shop:

100 jumbo (6×4”) prints would cost:

Epson RX610:
Paper: R170.00
Ink: R840.00 (set of ink will lat an estimate of 100 photo prints)

Total: R1010.00

Professional Printing Shop:

Total: R250.00

Conclusion:

The Epson printer offers some benefits, in terms of convenience. In terms of costs, the professional printers cost a fifth less.

But I must admit, having a printer that can scan, copy, and photo print when I like it to is definitely a luxury worth having. I thoroughly enjoyed testing this unit and having an all-in-one machine at my desk. I used all its functionalities on a daily basis with no troubleshooting and never a bad print-out. I would not try to sell it purely as a photo printer (the cost analysis above explains why) but as a handy office assistant.

Costs:

RX610 retails for: R2199.99

Inks: R140.00 each

Glossy Photo Paper (pack of 50) - 4″ X 6″: R85.00

Rate this review:

(2 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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Filed Under Computing, Epson, Featured Reviews