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Likes
- Excellent tonal range of black and white prints.
- Wide color gamut.
- Exceptional color accuracy.
- Easy-to-use controls.
Dislikes
- Slow photo print times.
- Weak black tones.
- Internal color management controls unsatisfactory.
- No Ethernet or wireless capabilities.
Conclusion
The Epson Stylus Photo R2400 is a very high quality professional photo printer for under $1,000. The printer sets up easily, with few parts to assemble. Ink tanks install and replace with little effort. The R2400 comes with handy additional print trays and attachments for thicker media as well as roll paper. The control panel is minimal, with just four buttons to control the printer, and no display screen.
The R2400’s drivers provide good choices for editing and enhancing of black-and-white photos. But the settings are not easily previewed. Users may wish to use Photoshop’s controls instead. Color management choices are good as well, but we found the best results were obtained by printing through Photoshop and letting that program control color management as well.
Document printing times on the R2400 were not fast, but they were on par with other pro photo printers, such as the Canon Pixma Pro9000. However, photo printing speed rates were incredible slow—the slowest of any printer yet tested. See the Document Performance page and the Photo Performance page for more details.
The R2400 certainly shined in our photo print quality tests. It scored much higher than any printer yet tested for color accuracy and color gamut. While the density of the blackest blacks was not as high as we’d like to see for a printer with such exceptional black-and-white printing capabilities, the R2400 produced very nice quality black-and-white prints, with a wide tonal range and good contrast. Document printed poorly, with washed-out looking text that showed fuzzy edges.
Two printers made by the bigger printer manufacturers are competitively priced with the R2400. The Canon Pixma Pro 9500, also a pigment-ink printer, sells for the same price ($849). However, the 9500 has one extra ink and the matte and photo blacks are automatically swapped, as opposed to manually switching them in the R2400’s nine-ink system. The 9500 also prints with more nozzles at a slightly smaller droplet size. The HPB9180, also using pigment inks, features a display, much greater RAM, better connectivity options (Ethernet, media slots, and PictBridge), and built-in color calibration. See the Overall Impressions page for more information on these other printers.
It’s hard not to recommend the R2400. The print quality is exceptional. It’s worst deficiencies—poor document printing, poor onboard color management system, and slow print times—can be overlooked for those consumers not worried about print speed and who will be using the unit through an advanced image editing program. Note that the R2400 does not ship Windows Vista ready, but consumers can download the drivers from Epson’s website.
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