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It may literally be another banner year for Epson America, Inc., the electronics firm that has made quite an impact on photographers in recent years with its inkjet printers, flatbed scanners, and digital cameras. Now Epson claims that its newest printer, the Stylus Photo EX ($499) can print "photo reproduction quality" (PRQ) 11x7-inch prints and wideformat banners up to 11x44 inches long. In addition, the 1440x720 dpi Stylus Photo EX supposedly delivers smoother color gradations, sharper text, and faster print speeds than its very successful predecessor, the Stylus Photo (now priced at $250). That's quite a set of claims considering the print quality we got from the Stylus Photo (See "Pictures, pictures, everywhere", October '97, page 40). Could a printer in this price range really do all that? We had to find out.
Right out of the box the new EX printer appeared similar in many ways to the original Stylus Photo, albeit a little wider. Installation was as simple as it gets, and we had the printer up and running on our Macintosh 8500/150 PowerPC within ten minutes. The printer even uses the same two-cartridge ink set of the Stylus Photo. All in all there are six inks, not just the four found in most inkjet printers. The first cartridge contains only black ink (which gets used up faster and can be replaced separately), the second contains five color inks-cyan, magenta, yellow, light cyan, and...