Epson Artisan 725

If you want to print photos and only photos, the Artisan 725 from Epson is a sure bet.

Tiny details such as cats’ whiskers are perfectly delineated, sharp to a degree that many other inkjets we’ve tested can’t replicate. Six-colour inkjet technology gives great colour accuracy: what you get on screen is very much what comes out on paper. No odd colour-casts, gradients or other anomalies.

Colours on regular, unedited photographs aren’t quite as vibrant as you’d find on, for instance, the HP Photosmart C310a. If you want rich, oversaturated colours, you’re going to have to modify your photos to get that. Which is, in our opinion, exactly how it should be. When your printer accurately reproduces what you see on screen, getting prints exactly the way you want them becomes very easy.

The downside? We’ve been talking about prints on Epson’s glossy photo paper. On cheap, plain copy paper? The results are far less impressive. The level of detail suffers a bit (though it remains fairly high in comparison to other models), and colours become rather under-saturated. The Artisan also has a tendency to blur text a little, making it less than ideal as an all-around home printer.

It does have the nifty ability to print surfaces onto inkjet-printable CDs and DVDs, which is nice if you have photo collections, movies or other such discs to label. A built-in CD tray makes this easy, with perfect alignment every time.

Sadly, the flatbed scanner lacks that perfect alignment: copies were often a few degrees off straight. Annoying when you’re scanning forms or documents, in particular. Plain-paper copies also couldn’t match the detail of the Workforce 633.

As a glossy, 4 x 6 and A4 photo printer, the Artisan 725 is a strong performer. However, it’s best paired up with a cheap monochrome laser to handle text printing jobs, where its own performance is weak.