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 When you see that Epson’s new Stylus Photo 900 ($185 street) prints T-shirt iron-ons, scrapbook pages, greeting cards, and even CDs, it’s hard to take it seriously as a photo printer. Any low-buck printer that can stray so far from photo stock is more toy than tool, right?
But in our tests, the SP900 proved a very able photo printer. In 20 test prints, image detail from this six-color inkjet was quite good. Compared to a dye-sub printer in a higher price range (such as the $370 Olympus P-400), the SP900 is superior, with individual eyelashes appearing in shots that the dye-sub blurred. Color gradation was also impressive. The SP900 produced no banding; that is, it shifted smoothly from one tone to another. Shadow detail, too, earned high marks, and in photos of backlit trees, the texture of the bark was clearly visible. Less expensive four-color inkjets often block up subtle shadow details.
The SP900 can make borderless prints from 4x6 to 81¼2x11, and panoramic prints up to 8x44 inches. To make borderless prints on the Mac OS X version, I had to add Epson SP900-
borderless as a “new” printer. I found that strange, since on most other printers, going borderless is as easy as clicking a box.
In our tests, the print times varied by paper. The SP900 defaults its resolution settings according to paper. To override this, look under the advanced settings in the Printer Settings menu and choose from Normal, Fine, Photo, Best Photo, and Photo RPM. In any case, the SP900 is relatively slow, at 4 min 47 sec for an 8x10 semigloss. (By comparison, Canon’s $150 S900 took 1.5 minutes).
 But the fact that the SP900 prints onto CDs makes it easy to forgive its lack of speed. Forget stick-on labels, or scribbling on the discs. With printable CD-Rs and DVD-Rs (Maxell and Verbatim offer them), you can make a good-looking and logical file system for your music and image CDs, as well as your DVD movies and slideshows.
We tested the SP900 with both a Mac and a PC. Each version has software for designing discs with a range of shapes, types, backgrounds, and color (the Mac software, however, gives you more creative options). You also can create your design in another program (such as Photoshop) and then input it. Just make sure it’s all lined up and that nothing is lost from the edges or center.
While the CD sits in a special holder for printing, the image didn’t print precisely centered on the disc during our first attempts. But after a little tweaking on the software and a couple of misprinted CDs, we had the SP900 turning them out flawlessly.
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