This eight-colour inkjet photo printer is a direct competitor for Canon's seven-colour i990. Where Canon adds light cyan, light magenta and red to the standard CMYK quartet, Epson goes for an extra black, a red, a blue and a gloss optimiser. This last is intended to improve the gloss finish of digital photo prints, while the two blacks are used for best results on matt and glossy papers.

It's a big and bulky printer, partly a function of the larger than normal print head required to carry the eight ink tanks. You can feed sheets of paper from a hopper at the rear to a telescopic tray at the front. It's good to be able to fold the trays out of the way, but the output tray in particular is quite flimsy when extended. Roll paper holders are supplied, if you prefer to use custom cut roll paper, and there's a separate holder to slide printable CD blanks into the machine.

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The Stylus Photo R800 works through USB 2 and Firewire connections, but there's no legacy parallel socket on this printer. Four buttons, for power, roll and sheet paper feeds and ink maintenance are all the physical controls you get, with the software drivers doing the rest.

Separate software is supplied for Windows and Mac OS. The driver is comprehensive and includes useful information such as real-time ink levels. The printer produced a five by three-inch print in one minute and eight seconds, which is very reasonable.

Print quality is true to life; a little less vivid than from the Canon i990, but more believable. Epson claims the extra ink colours add life to sky, sea and sunsets and we wouldn't argue there. The different black inks optimise prints for matt and glossy paper, producing excellent results on both types of media.

Each of the seven coloured ink tanks costs around £11.75 at street prices, with the gloss optimiser coming in at around £7. Each can produce 400 pages at 5 percent A4 cover, according to Epson, but since a print will only ever use matt or gloss black, it's best to cost a page out as cyan, magenta, yellow, black, red, blue and optimiser.

So, for a 30 percent cover print with gloss, you'd be paying around 20p, or around 53p for 80 percent cover. To that you can add about 40p for a sheet of photo paper, giving a total of around 93p per A4 page.

This is a very competent photo printer. The extra inks are used to increase the colour gamut so it more closely resembles that of silver halide photography. The tiny drop size, now down to 1.5pl, gives a very fine grain to prints. More versatile than its main rival, the Stylus Photo R800 should also be a little cheaper to run.