While HP may be the king of multifunction printers and office all-in-ones, Epson has been generally good at providing good picture and photo quality. When buying a photo printer, there are several things to take into account, like resolution, number of inks, price and features. One can achieve satisfactory results when printing photos on your standard inkjet printer, but if you're a bit more pretentious and are looking for high quality printing to match your high quality digital camera, then you might as well buy a dedicated photo printer.

The main difference between Epson's 830 and 830u, two of the company's photo printers, is that the later has 2 USB ports, one of which is positioned on the back of the device, with the second being on the front. Epson added the second USB port for allowing the user to connect a notebook in the front port (to print out photos) without having to disconnect the printer from the PC it's hooked to on a regular basis. But just be aware that for the printer to work with a notebook, you'll have to install the drivers on it.



The interesting thing about the Epson 830u photo printer is that it has a color cartridge including six colors, instead of the usual three that we find in other products. There is also a separate black ink cartridge. The main idea to the use of more colors was that it's meant to make photo printing more accurate. A bigger palette of colors means higher quality and prints that look more realistic.

Since it isn't burdened with any extra features (like in the case of inkjet all-in-ones) and focused strictly on printing pictures, the quality of the prints is remarkable. The speed isn't all that great and you may have to grab a coffee or entertain yourself with something else while waiting for your photos to be printed, but they say all good things are worth the wait. It's also recommended that you use high quality photo paper when using the Epson 830u to print. Epson claims that their photo paper will maintain it's color and quality for over 20 years.

Printing text, however is not so great, but as mentioned before, this device is strictly targeting people who are only interested in the quality of the photos it can provide.The software that the printer comes with is rather complex, and you could call it a photo laboratory on your PC screen. It includes various features for maintenance, calibration and the user will be able to change almost any setting including saturation, contrast or the strength of each color.



Among its inconveniences we can mention that it generally consumes a lot of ink, and when you'll want to replace the cartridges you'll find that they are somewhat expensive. On the bright side, the initial price you'll pay for the printer is very low. So comparing quality to price, it's safe to say that the Epson Stylus Photo 830U printer is worth it.