Wed, 16 Jan 2013 Epson Expression Photo XP-750 review

Epson’s Expression Photo XP-750 printer has a very similar design to that of the XP-605 model that we reviewed a couple of months ago. However, its six-colour printing system is very much aimed at photo enthusiasts who want the very best quality for their photo prints.

The XP-750 is housed in a black plastic chassis, rather than the more Mac-like white of the XP-605, but it has the same compact design. It measures just 390mm wide, 340mm deep and 141mm high, so it will fit easily onto a desk or shelf at home or in a small office. It also has the same resolution as the XP-605 – 5760x1440 for printing and 1200dpi for scanning – and the same paper capacity, with a 100-sheet tray at the front and a second 20-sheet tray at the back for photo paper.

That’s where the similarities end, though. Priced at £230.00, the XP-750 is the more expensive of the two printers by a good £80.00, and includes a number of additional features. It has a larger, 8.8cm touch-sensitive control panel that is comfortable and easy to use, and includes an Ethernet interface as well as wifi for people who have a wired network in their office.

However, the most important difference lies in its six-colour printing system. As well as the conventional cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks (CMYK) the XP-750 also uses additional inks for light-cyan and light-magenta. These two extra inks help to produce more subtle graduations of tone on details such as skin tones, and the XP-750 really did produce excellent results with our photo test files – especially when using Epson’s top-quality ultra-glossy photo paper.

The XP-750’s six coloured inks produce impressive photo output

Ironically, though, text quality wasn’t quite as good as it might have been. It’s adequate for home users who just want to print out the occasional letter or school report, but lacked the near-laser smoothness that we’ve seen from some of Epson’s other inkjet printers.

Performance is relatively modest too, at about eight pages per minute for both mono text and documents containing mixed text-and-graphics. Printing an A4 photo on plain paper took only 20 seconds, but printing the same photo on glossy paper took a full 150 seconds – although the quality of those glossy prints was well worth waiting for.

We were also pleasantly surprised by the printer’s running costs. You can buy an ‘Elephant’ multipack containing the largest sizes of all six ink cartridges for about £75 from Epson, and that will produce 500 pages of mono text and 740 pages in colour. That works out at a fairly reasonable 2.5p per page for mono text. Colour printing adds up to about 8.5p per page, which is slightly more expensive than a conventional four-colour printer – typically around 7.5p per page – but that little extra cost is justified by the excellent quality of the printer’s photo-output.