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Photo Speed/Timing (2.31)
The Epson R2400 was a real slowpoke when it came to printing photos of any size. As with documents, we used Photo Best quality for our tests. The printer took 2.63 minutes to print a 4" x 6" photo (0.38 ppm) and 5.26 minutes to print an 8.5" x 11" photo (0.19 ppm). A3-sized (13" x 19") prints were the real time-suck, taking 11 minutes (0.09 ppm) to print a 6-megabyte file and 25 minutes (0.04 ppm) to print a 19-megabyte file. This compares to a half minute for 4" x 6" photos, about 2.4 minutes for 8.5" x 11" photos, and 4 to 5 minutes for 13" x 19" images on the Canon Pixma Pro9000.
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Photo Print Speeds in Pages per Minute
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4x6
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8.5 x 11
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13 x 19
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sml
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lge
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sml
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lge
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sml
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lge
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Canon Pixma Pro9000
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2.00
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2.00
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0.40
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0.41
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0.18
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0.24
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Kodak EasyShare 5300 AIO
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2.18
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1.67
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0.58
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0.56
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n/a
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n/a
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Canon Pixma MP600 AIO
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1.62
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1.66
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0.52
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0.51
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n/a
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n/a
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Epson Stylus Photo R2400
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0.38
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0.38
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0.19
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0.19
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0.09
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0.04
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The R2400’s printer drivers give the user a high speed option, but the User’s Guide warns that print quality will diminish when this is enabled. High speed is the default setting, indicated by a checkbox in the Advanced settings. This seems counterintuitive. The checkbox is easily overlooked, so users may not even be aware that they’re printing at a reduced quality even when they select Photo Best. Let’s hope Epson changes this in driver updates and future versions of the driver software.
Color Accuracy (15.19)
We test color accuracy by comparing the color values of a digital version of the Gretag Macbeth Colorchecker chart printed on the test printer with the actual La*b* values used to construct the chart. (The Colorchecker chart is a standardized color patch chart composed of colors commonly found in photographs. See the sample chart below.) We read the printed chart’s values with an EyeOne Pro spectrophotometer. The difference between these two sets of values results in a color error value for each color. We pool these values for each printer to give us the average color error.
The test chart (not the sample one above) was printed on the Stylus Photo R2400 using both the ICC profile downloaded from the Epson website for Epson Premium Photo Paper Glossy and a custom profile we created for the same paper using Eye-One Match software and the Eye-One Pro spectrophotometer. Both of these were printed on the highest quality setting (called Photo RPM). Epson notes in the User’s Guide that the downloaded profiles should perform better than the stock profile that the printer ships with since the downloaded profiles are customized for a particular paper printed at a specific quality setting.
The average color error for the downloaded profile was 1.42, a startlingly good value which was completely off the charts. The custom profile yielded low color error as well, at 2.48. These were much better values than any printer tested so far. As a point of comparison, the Canon Pro9000, an eight-dye-ink printer, had a color error of 7.13. (The score that the R2400 received is based on the downloaded profile.)
The low error value, while surprising, is in line with the overall print quality that this printer generated. For example, the color gamut of the R2400 is much wider than any printer so far tested (see Color Gamut below).
The R2400 exhibited the least color error in the orange, magenta, and purple patches. The most error occurred in the red, yellow, green, and blue colors, but these values were still way below any other printer tested. Skin tones had low error with light skin reproducing less closely to the ideal than dark skin. White, gray tones, and black, reproduced mixed, with neutral 8 gray and black having some of the lowest error values of all colors, while white and neutral 6.5 have some of the highest values. The color accuracy was very noticeable in our test prints. Our landscape test print, for example, had very neutral highlights and gray tones in the clouds. No color cross-over or metamerism was evident.
Color Gamut (8.73)
Color gamut is the range of reproducible colors. The wider the gamut a printer can achieve, the more colors it can reproduce. We measure a printer’s gamut by visualizing the printer profiles using Gamutvision. The printer profile’s gamut is represented by the color blob in the gamut map below. This is compared to the Adobe RGB color space, which represents 1,225,088 colors, displayed as the wire frame surrounding the Epson R2400’s globular color space.
The Epson R2400 profiles represented the widest gamut of colors of any printer yet tested—a whopping 66 percent of the Adobe RGB space, or 809,295 colors. This far outstripped the Canon Pro9000, the R2400’s closest competitor in our testing so far, which produced only 56 percent of the colors in the Adobe RGB space. This value is near the top of what this class of printer is able to achieve, and it demonstrates the wider gamut possible with the R2400’s Ultrachrome K3 pigment inks. Prior to their development, the color gamut achievable with pigment inks were inferior to that of dye-based inks.
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Epson R2400 Standard Profile
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Epson R2400 Downloaded Profile for Epson Premium Photo Paper Glossy
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These gamut maps show the color gamut for the Epson stock profile that ships with the printer (on the left) and the downloaded profile for Epson Premium Photo Paper Glossy printed in Best Photo quality (on the right). The stock profile exhibits a larger number of colors, but there is a noticeable difference in color representation. Greens and blues are less well represented in the standard profile, but much more of the blue/purple/magenta end of the spectrum is evident, as well as more yellows and greens.
Dmax (6.37)
The Epson Stylus Photo R2400 scored very well on our Dmax test. This is a measurement of the densest black possible using a densitometer, in our case, the EyeOne Pro spectrophotometer from Gretag Macbeth. The ideal value of a printer is 2.50. The R2400’s blackest black registered 2.26, in line with Epson’s reported value of 2.3 for the Ultrachrome K3 inks. This is on par with the Canon Pixma Pro9000, an eight-ink dye printer, which registered a value of 2.25. As good as these values are, we expected more from such a high-end photo printer geared toward black-and-white printing.
Black and White (8.00)
The limited black density of the Epson R2400 was noticeable in our test black-and-white prints. The shadows on some paper surfaces seemed to lack the punch of other printers with higher values. Despite this, the tonal range was wide, with good details showing in the highlights. The best looking print was on Epson’s Luster paper, which showed the deepest blacks, but more contrast than the Velvet Fine Art paper, which had the smoothest looking tonal range.
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