If you need a relatively inexpensive second home printer primarily for printing photos, or if you have a personal monochrome laser and need an ink jet for printing in color, the Epson Stylus Photo R220 ($100 street) may be just what you're looking for. It offers reasonably high quality across the board and very good performance for photos. It's also a potential choice as a single all-purpose home printer, but only if you don't mind waiting for output, particularly for text documents.

The R220's claim to being a photo printer rests strictly on printing photos well—you won't find photo-oriented extras such as a PictBridge connector or memory card slots for direct printing. You will, however, find a second USB connector on the front, letting you easily connect a notebook computer temporarily, or perform similar tasks. The ability to print directly on printable optical discs, for professional-looking disc labeling, is a more notable extra.

Setup is standard for a printer that connects by USB cable and uses six ink colors with a separate cartridge for each color—cyan, yellow, magenta, black, light cyan, and light magenta. Find a spot for the 7.8- by 18.5- by 10.5-inch (HWD) printer, snap in the cartridges, load paper, run the automated installation routine, and plug in the USB cable.

Performance is a mixed bag. On our photo suite (timed with QualityLogic's hardware and software, www.qualitylogic.com) the printer averaged 1 minute 59 seconds for each 4-by-6 photo and 4:03 for each 8-by-10, earning a very good rating. That essentially ties with the Canon Pixma iP1600, the fastest ink jet printer we've tested that sells for the same or less. And it's not all that much slower than the somewhat more expensive Editors' Choice Canon Pixma iP4200, which averaged 1:18 for each 4-by-6 and 3:12 for each 8-by-10.

On our business applications suite, in contrast, the R220 did poorly, with a 27:45 total time, compared with 17:59 for the HP Deskjet 5940 Photo Printer (a direct competitor), 21:52 for the less expensive iP1600, and 15:04 for the iP4200. A look at the individual tests shows that the R220 was only a little slower than the 5940 on files that include graphics or photos but fell far behind on files with nothing but text. If you often print text-only files, you may consider the R220's speed a serious problem.

Output quality is more consistent than performance. Text and graphics quality were good throughout and photo output was even better. In fact, output quality overall was among the best for ink jets in this price range. Most photos in our tests qualified as true photo quality, suitable for albums or framing. We did notice a slight darkening effect, as if the photos had been modified with a neutral gray filter. On a few test photos, this gave a muddy look to some colors. In addition, the monochrome test photo showed tints of various colors at different gray levels. If you don't plan to print monochrome photos, however, this won't be an issue.

With text, the printer does better on quality than speed. More than half of our test fonts were easily readable at 5 points, with some readable at 4 and none needing to be larger than 12 points. Unless you have an unusual need for small fonts, you should be happy with the output. Graphics showed a number of minor flaws, including subtle banding in one image in default mode and a tendency to lose thin lines. But the output is easily good enough to bring into the office for internal business use, and the overall effect is marginally good enough to use with output intended for people you want to impress with your professionalism.

Perhaps the best reason to buy the R220 is to print on optical discs, a relatively rare feature in this category. It would also serve you well as a dedicated photo printer. But if you need a single all-purpose printer, take a look at the Deskjet 5940 and the somewhat more expensive iP4200, both of which offer the same level of output quality at faster speeds.

Compare the photo printers mentioned above side by side.

Don't miss the Epson Stylus Photo R220's Ratings and Test Results.