I have said it before and I'll say it again, I love Epson printers. The SP1270 is no exception. A couple of weeks ago, our well-used (read: abused) SC850 finally quit printing red. (It is still being utilized for b&w printing.) Since the printer was being used by the marketing coordinator, she does a lot of high quality printing of brochures, handouts, etc. She needs a good durable printer that produces great quality printouts.

Off I went in search of a new printer for her. We already have two HP 970 Cxi's in the office, and we have been very happy with them. But when I saw this printer, the thing that jumped out at me was the wide-format capability. It will print up to 13" x 19". This was the deciding factor - since the printers were otherwise comparably equipped and priced, this feature will be more useful to her than automatic two-sided printing.

I didn't know until the printer arrived that it was six-color instead of four. Most color inkjet printers are CMYK - Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black. Sometimes the black cartridge is separate, and sometimes it's not. But the color cartridge for this printer has five tanks - two shades of cyan (blue), two shades of magenta (red), and one yellow. This makes for more accurate color matching.

As usual, I am in charge of setup and, um, stress testing and calibration. *g* My grandmother just found some old photos (snapshots from my parents' wedding), so I decided to scan them and see what I could do with them.

I used our HP scanner (which I have also reviewed) to scan the 3" x 3" print at 200 dpi. Then I opened the print in PhotoShop, and increased the size to 4" x 4". That's all I did as far as editing goes. I sent a print command, and in the options I told it to print on "Photo Quality Glossy Paper", "Photo Enhance", "People". Then I sat back and let it do its thing. Luckily for me the printer came free samples of photo paper, so I wasn't shelling out $$$ on paper that would potentially be wasted by a lousy print job.

It took it just under a minute to print the photo. The results: beautiful. The printed photo looked better than the original. It was brighter and clearer than the 30+ year old print. I cut the paper down to 5" x 7" (left a little white around the edges to make it look like a mat) and framed the print. Unless you studied it carefully, you would NEVER be able to tell that it was produced on a printer and not from a negative at a photo lab.

The one problem we have encountered so far: lack of cartridge availability. Office Depot (our supplier of choice) does not yet carry the color cartridge. However, we were able to get it from PC Connection (the same place we got the printer) at a reasonable price.

Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 391
Operating System: Windows