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Ease of Use (7.50)
The Epson Stylus Photo R2400 is an easy printer to operate. The four simple buttons on the control panel are intuitive. Ink cartridges install and replace without trouble. Driver controls are fairly easy to understand, although there are a couple of quirks and defaults to get used to, such as the high speed default printing setting. Even though there are additional paper trays to set up for non-standard media, these are not difficult to attach.
Value (7.00)
As an eight-ink printer with a wide color gamut and dedicated inks for printing in black and white, the Epson Stylus Photo R2400 provides excellent quality at a competitive price. The equivalent printer from Canon, the Pixma Pro9500, sells for the same price. A similar HP model, the Photosmart B9180, sells for $150 less.
Comparisons
Printers of this quality are only offered by a few manufacturers, notably Epson, Canon, and HP. We’ve included the Epson Stylus Photo 3800 for consumers trying to decide whether or not to spend that extra cash.
 The Canon Pixma Pro9500 ($849) is the most similar to the R2400 of all pro photo printers models on the market. Like the R2400, the Pro9500 uses pigment inks, but there are ten inks instead of nine. Color inks common to both printers include cyan, magenta, yellow, photo cyan, and photo magenta. Epson calls these last two light cyan and light magenta. The Pro9500 has one less gray than the R2400, but it does have a separate matte black and photo black, which do not need to be manually swapped, like in the R2400. Red and green inks round out the Pro9500’s ink roster.
The Pro9500 can make prints at 4800 x 2400 dpi, while the R2400 can produce 5760 x 1440 dpi prints. Three-picoliter (pl) ink droplets are sprayed through the Pro9500’s 7,680 print head nozzles, while the R2400 utilizes only 180 nozzles per cartridge for a total of 1,440 nozzles spraying 3.5-pl droplets.
Both printers are capable of a maximum print width of 13 inches, but the Pro9500 does not have a separate roll paper attachment, which comes standard with the R2400. Neither printer is Windows Vista compliant, but drivers can be downloaded from the manufacturers’ websites.
 For those reticent about spending the extra $450 for the Epson Stylus Pro 3800 ($1,295), what would be gained would be an increase in print size, with 17-inch-wide prints, and automation, with automatic switching of matte black to photo black and back. However, it takes nearly 3 minutes to change from matte to photo (with a startling 4.5 ml used for the switch!) and nearly 2 minutes from photo to matte (with 1.5 ml used). Fortunately, the Pro 3800 comes with large 80-ml ink cartridges, opposed to the much smaller cartridges standard with the R2400. This drops the cost per milliliter down to 75 cents from our rough estimate of $1.15 for the R2400.
The Pro 3800 incorporates what Epson calls "ultramodern photographic screening technology" to assist with dot placement. The Pro 3800 also features a small LCD display for monitoring ink levels and other printer data.
One loss with the upgrade is in resolution. The Pro 3800 is only capable of 2880 x 1440 dpi, while the R2400 can print 5760 x 1440 optimized dpi images with the RPM system.
 While $150 cheaper than the Canon Pro9500 or the Epson R2400, the HP Photosmart B9180 ($699) may be the closest HP model in terms of paper size and ink system to these two models. It can print on 13-inch-wide paper, and its eight-ink pigment system has the same configuration as the Epson R2400, with the omission of one of the gray inks.
Where this introductory HP pro photo printer has Canon and Epson beat is in connectivity. Both the Canon and the Epson models do not have memory card slots, while the HP8750 has both memory card slots and a PictBridge connection. It also comes standard with Ethernet networking capability. Additionally, the B9180 has built-in color calibration and is Windows Vista ready.
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