Printing with the Epson SureColor P600 wide format inkjet printer

There are two different ways in which you can feed media to the Epson SureColor P600: there's a paper tray on the back of the printer and a media tray on its front. The main paper tray is on the back and it can hold up to 120 sheets of plain paper or 30 sheets of photo paper, at a maximum size of 13 x 19 inches (33 x 48 cm).

Also on the back of the printer, you can attach the holders you get in the standard packaging, and use them to feed the Epson SureColor P600 with 13 inches wide roll paper.

On the front of the Epson SureColor P600, there's another tray, useful for feeding the printer with fine art paper or printable CDs and DVDs. It's worth mentioning that you can use media that's up to 1.3 mm (0.05 in) thick.

During the time we had the Epson SureColor P600 in testing, we printed both text and photos, both in color and in black and white.

Although this is a wide format photo printer, that's capable of printing on A3+ paper, we would like to start by telling you that it's also great printer for by printing documents on plain paper. The results are very good in terms of quality and the speed at which the SureColor P600 prints is very fast. If you'll do a lot of plain paper printing on this printer, we're pretty sure that if it could talk, the Epson SureColor P600 would stop after a while and tell you something like: "Hey, is that all you've got?" 🙂

The Epson SureColor P600 is not a printer for clerk offices - this is a printer for photo studios, designer studios and for amateur photographs. It can print photos at a maximum resolution of 5760 x 1444 dpi, but the larger the photo, the longer the time it will need to print. If you print on small size sheets, like 4 x 6 inches (10 x 15 cm), you'll get one per minute approximately. But if you'll print large size photos, with complex compositions and lots of colors, it could take a while for the printer to finish printing them. It also depends quite a lot on what level of quality you set the printer to use - if you choose the maximum quality setting, you might even double the time needed to print a large A3 photo.

All things considered, you probably shouldn't be picky when it comes to the print times in the case of large resolution photos printed on large paper sheets. After all, in this case, we are more interested in the quality of the prints rather than the speed at which they're done.

To give you an idea of the speed and results the Epson SureColor P600 gives you when printing photos, we used a few sheets of A3 Kodak Ultra Premium Photo Paper and we printed a few photos. We chose one color and two black and white photos and we selected the maximum quality setting available in the printer's drivers. The average time we recorded was approximately 8 minutes for each photo to print. And the results were great - Epson's SureColor P600 offers an extremely high level of detail.

One thing that we wished to have been able to tell you was how much time the photos will last. Unfortunately, this is not something we can test and only time will tell if the photos will keep their beautiful colors.

Running costs

The Epson SureColor P600 photo printer is a great piece of hardware, but like anything good in this world, it comes at a price. At the time this review was published, the Epson SureColor P600 has a price of approximately $800.

Add the fact that the printer uses nine ink cartridges and each of them is close to $30 . That means that a full set of ink cartridges will take around $270 out of your pockets. If you're going to print on 13 x 19 inches premium photo paper , 20 sheets will take another $30 toll on your wallet. The photo prints you get are incredibly beautiful and their quality is undeniable, but the Epson SureColor P600 is not a cheap printer to own.

Pros and cons

Here are the main pros of buying an Epson SureColor P600 wide format photo inkjet printer:

• Incredible colors and blacks, thanks to its nine pigment ink cartridges
• Very high details - can print photos at a maximum resolution of 5760 x 1444 dpi
• Can print wide format photo paper - up to 13 inches (33 cm) wide and up to 10 feet (304 cm) in length, when you use roll paper
• Fast when using the "quality" preset
• Lots of connectivity options - USB, Ethernet, WiFi, Google Cloud Print, Apple AirPrint
• LCD touch display
• Easy to set up

And its main weaknesses are:

• Relatively high running costs - although the printer has a reasonable price, the inks are pretty expensive, considering that it's using nine different ink cartridges
• Slow when using the "maximum quality" preset
• Epson doesn't include a USB and/or an Ethernet cable in the standard package

Verdict

The Epson SureColor P600 wide format photo inkjet printer is a great piece of hardware and we must admit that it managed to impress us. The quality of the photos that you print with it is astounding, both when you print in color and when you print in black and white. The color photos have rich and vibrant colors, and the black and white photos and graphics you print have an incredible amount of detail. The four different black inks manage to deliver excellent results. This is a printer that we will recommend to any photographer, both enthusiast or professional.

On the other hand, the Epson SureColor P600 is not a printer for your average home user and we cannot recommend it if all you want is to print a photo every month or so, or you print lots of text documents on a daily basis. That would be a waste - it's like asking a sports car to drive on a 20 miles / 30 km speed limit.