There was a phase when printers started appearing in various subtle shades of iPod cream, but fortunately that highly impractical colour now seems to be out of fashion. Epson's latest low-end photo printer has sensibly opted for the smarter chrome and black look, which will fit comfortably into a home or small office environment.

A sensible rectangular shape and weighing a mere 5.4kg, the Stylus Photo R285 has clearly been designed with simplicity as its virtue. There's a reclining paper feeder at the back and a drop-down extendable paper tray at the front and, apart from the power lead, there's just a USB 2.0 port to connect with your PC.

The controls are equally basic: an on/off button, an ink cartridge indicator which flashes when you need a replacement and a paper alarm for when your paper runs out. Annoyingly and unnecessarily, only the on/off button has a highlighted symbol so you'll have to screw your eyes up to read the other two in low light conditions.

Get the latest Dell Coupons and other computer coupons at CheapStingyBargains.com.

Curiously for such an uncomplicated machine, the only additional piece of hardware is a plastic CD/DVD holder which is fiddly to set up: the paper tray has first to be taken out and then re-inserted so that it lies flat and then the CD/DVD holder has to be slid inside the brackets on the tray. The relevant disk is then placed in the holder and fixed in place using the supplied adapter and you're then ready to start printing your label.

As the main reasons for buying a standalone printer are cost, speed and quality, it's clear that on the first count this is an easily affordable printer for those on limited budgets. As for speed, the official line is that you can get up to 37ppm for black text on A4-sized paper and 38ppm for colour text on the same medium.

In reality, we could only manage to squeeze out four normal pages of A4 black text with a Times New Roman font size 12 in one minute using the standard setting, and it was a similar time for text with colour inserts.

In terms of print quality, naturally the best results were reserved for photos, as this was what the printer was principally designed for. Making use of the six separate Claria cartridges (good for costs and also for longevity) with up to 5,760 x 1,440 optimised dpi, the results were surprisingly vivid with authentic colour reproduction, although there was an occasional tendency to make darker areas a shade too dark. Also be aware that the surface of the print stays tacky for a while after printing, especially on Epson's Premium Glossy paper.

The other plus point is you get the full complement of Epson's highly-regarded software package which includes Epson Creativity Suite, Epson Web-To-Page, Epson Easy Photo Print, Epson Print CD, Epson Scan Assistant, Epson Attach to Email and Epson Copy Utility. So your DVDs at least should look stunning.

A fairly stylish, lightweight, relatively uncomplicated and cheap photo printer that produces very favourable quality output but at unimpressive speeds. It's good, but doesn't quite do enough to make it stand out from the herd.