Thread: Epson Stylus C90 printer.

Epson Stylus C90 printer.

Meant for everyday printing, the Epson C90 is an all¬black printer that is easy to install and use. Unlike the Lexmark 2465, the C90 has solid build quality and looks appealing. The only gripe with the printer is that it takes some time to initialize and also produces some noise while printing. The noise at times may irritate you and people around you. The C90 uses four cartridges. The advantage over the conventional tri-colour single cartridge is that if you run out of ink of a particular colour you need to replace only that. This reduces ink wastage and optimizes saving.

On the performance front, the test prints were pretty impressive. The printer churns out prints both colour and text at pretty decent speeds. The colour reproduction of the printer was good. However, the shades of black were little lighter as compared to others. Font size even as small as 4 point was readable. Printing photos on photo quality paper also delivered good result.



Epson claims to use DuraBrite Ultra ink that provides smudge, water and fade-resistant quality prints that lasts longer. Epson claims a print speed of 25ppm in black and 13ppm in colour both in draft mode. The input tray capacity on the printer is 80 sheets, enough for a home or a SOHO user. Like all other printers in the test, the C90 accepts all types of paper.

The C90 comes with Epson's creativity suite that lets you perform tweak the printer settings to your taste. It even lets you print photographs straight off the hard disk drive. You can also select the type of layout you want from a choice of Borderless, Index prints and single page. Like most other Epson printers, the C90 can print even without its top top cover. The C90 supports Windows and Mac operating systems.

Conclusion

In terms of print quality, there's very little to seperate these four printers. All of them produced decent results.
Differences in colour output are largely down to taste: All four printers will deliver a good-looking image from a mediocre photo and we found that in this respect they generally do a very good job.

Lexmark 2645 was a pretty average printer with poor build quality as well. The Canon Pixma range of printers were pretty decent and much similar to each other. The photo print quality offered by these printers was excellent. But the Epson's C90 was way and out the best in this test.