With six separate ink cartridges you would expect good print quality, and that's what you get: very good results in both color and black and white. Admittedly, a little graining is apparent on very pale colors, but that's the same old story. Black and white is equally good quality, even though the results of this configuration are a little lackluster.

Print Speed

The print engine of the Stylus Photo RX700 is inconsistent, to say the least. In photo mode, the separation of the cartridges and the printing head leads to excellent speed: an A4 photo can be printed in 2 minutes 20 seconds. On the other hand, in text mode it's a disaster: less than 7 ppm in draft mode for text, and as low as 3 ppm for documents with mixed text and graphics. These are results similar to what we saw a few years ago!

Cost Per Page

Despite the separate cartridges, the cost per page for the Stylus Photo RX700 is fairly average. For an A4 photo, 45 cents isn't significantly better than the Lexmark P6350, which still uses combined inks. The problem is the relatively short lifespan of the cartridges.

Scanning And Copying

As usual, scanning is the strong point of this multifunction printer from Epson. Five seconds is enough to preview an A4 document at 600 dpi, and less than 30 seconds will see it digitized. So you can, therefore, easily envisage scanning photo prints and slides, even at high resolution, without losing patience. On the other hand, the copy function is only average, once again because of the limitations of the print engine.