Clear View
The 785EPX can generate a number of page layouts ranging from single 8-by-10-inch layouts to 2-up 4-by-6-inch layouts to an index layout that prints a page of thumbnails of all the images on your card. So, if you want a quick set of 4-by-6-inch prints of all the images on your media card, you can simply stick the card into the printer, select the 2-up layout, and hit the print button. The 785 will automatically print all of your images, two per-page. The 785 will also let you select specific images, making it simple to print out just a few images using any of the printer’s supplied layouts. If your camera supports DPOF (Digital Print Order Format), which most do, you can use your camera to select the images you’d like to print. When you insert the card in the 785, it will read the DPOF order and print only those images.
Printing an index can be an easy way of seeing what pictures are on a card, but the tiny thumbnails are a bit too small to show much detail and the resulting page doesn’t show the filename for each image, making the index page of dubious value as a cataloging tool.
Obviously, one of the advantages of digital imaging is the ease with which you can correct and adjust your images. The 785EPX has a number of color-correction and -enhancement features built-in, and you can use the features when printing directly from a memory card. In addition to four different levels of brightness correction (two brighter, and two darker), the 785EPX provides automatic grayscale conversion and sepia toning; a high contrast filter; a “more vivid” filter, which increases color saturation; and a sharpen filter that applies a very nice, subtle level of sharpening. These filters can be applied to an individual image or to every image in a batch of prints. Unfortunately, you can’t stack up filters, so you won’t be able to both brighten and sharpen a print.
Of course these tools are no substitute for a real image editing program, but if you’re in a hurry and you know your camera always shoots a little soft, or that a particular set of images are too dark, these simple filters can make it easy to perform some basic correction before you print.
One downside to no-computer printing is longer print times. Because the printer has to do some extra processing to get the images off the card and arranged according to your layout, stand-alone print times can be much longer than when using a computer.
Printing the Old-Fashioned Way
Printing without a computer is cool, but for serious work you’ll definitely want to attach your Mac or PC to the printer’s USB port. Epson includes its standard printer driver and ColorSync profiles for all of its media types.
When connected to a computer, the printer also serves as a media reader. Any cards inserted into the printer’s PC Card slot appear on your computer’s desktop as another volume. So, if you haven’t already bought a media drive for your digital camera media, you’ll be able to use the 785 to transfer images from your media cards.
Quality-wise, there’s really nothing to complain about with the 785EPX. The 785EPX uses the same print engine as the Stylus Photo 780, giving the same image quality as the Stylus Photo 780, 890, and 1280 printers.
As with Epson’s other photo printers, the 785EPX does an incredible job of printing out what appear to be continuous-tone images. Detail, contrast, and color fidelity are impeccable, and you’d be hard-pressed to see any dots or dithering patterns, even in bright highlight areas. Because Epson’s photo printers use black ink instead of composite black for their photo printing, shadow detail and black areas are much richer than in many competing printers. As with their other 6-color, dye-based printers, Epson claims a longevity of up to 25 years when printing on certain types of media.
For photo printing, the 785 offers resolutions of 720 dpi, 1,440 dpi, and 2,880 dpi. In our tests we could discern no difference between 1,440 and 2,880 dpi except that printing at 2,880 took much more time and used a lot more ink. For almost all uses, 720 or 1,440 should provide all the quality you need.
Print speeds are respectable for prints of this quality. Epson claims around 8 minutes to print an 8-by-10-inch photo at 1,440 dpi and 3.5 minutes to print the same image at 720 dpi. Though results may vary, in general these seem like fair estimates.
Epson also claims black text speeds of 8 ppm. While this number also seems accurate and printed text looks very good, you’ll probably be better off printing your text elsewhere, given the high cost ($24.95) of the 785EPX’s black cartridge. Epson estimates 540 pages of text (at 5 percent coverage) for the black cartridge, yielding an average ink cost of about 5 cents per page. For color images, rated ink cost per page is roughly 9 cents at 15 percent coverage, but expect considerably higher coverage and, thereore, cost when printing photo images at 8 by 10 inches.
Finally, the 785EPX provides the same borderless, edge-to-edge printing capabilities as the 780, 890, and 1280 printers. Images can be printed edge-to-edge on any media smaller than 8 by 10 inches including roll paper that can be attached to the printer’s roll-feeding mechanism.
Brainless Color Correction
The 785EPX is Epson’s first printer to support Print Image Matching — an Epson initiative also being adopted by at least some other camera and printer vendors. Digital cameras that support Print Image Matching automatically embed printing parameters in an image’s data. Everything from gamma level to color space information, contrast, sharpness, and color balance information can be encoded in each image file. In theory, a printer that knows how to read this information can use it to make better prints. What’s more, cameras can encode different information for different types of shooting. A camera in macro mode, for example, might include special parameters for sharpness.
According to Epson, Print Image Matching has gained support from Casio, Konica, Kyocera, Minolta, Olympus, Ricoh, Sony, and Toshiba, though not all of these companies have yet released cameras that support Print Image Matching.
To put Print Image Matching to the test, we printed images from an Epson PhotoPC 3100Z with and without the Print Image Matching feature. Though the difference was slight, images printed with Print Image Matching enabled had slightly better color saturation and contrast.
Currently, the only way to access Print Image Matching printing is to print directly from a media card. Epson says it will soon release a driver that provides access to the Print Image Matching features.
Photo Finish
As with all of Epson’s Stylus Photo printers, the 785EPX’s greatest asset is its extraordinary print quality, but this printer’s built-in media slot could prove a real advantage if you like the idea of printing off proofs and the like quickly and easily. Whether this is the Epson printer for you depends on your printing needs. If you don’t need to print directly from a media card and know you won’t be using roll paper, then Epson’s $99 Stylus Photo 780 is a better choice. And if you need print sizes larger than 8 by 10 inches, then you’ll want to go with the 1280. The only advantages the 890 has over the 785EPX is slightly faster speed and lower sound level.
This article was last modified on January 18, 2023
This article was first published on August 29, 2001
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