Epson labels the SureColor P600 inkjet printer ($799.99) on its website as being for creative professionals. And indeed, its combination of exceptionally high-quality output, fast speed, and paper handling—with the ability to print panoramic photos at sizes as large as 13 by 129 inches—makes it easily suitable for professional photographers and graphic artists, as well as prosumers. Unfortunately, the P600 ($719.00 at Amazon) also suffers from some usability issues that take some of the shine off an otherwise highly appealing printer.

Ignoring the usability issues for the moment, the P600 is a clear cut above the Epson Stylus Photo R2000 ($699.99 at Adorama) , which is our preferred pick for a bargain-priced prosumer photo printer for up to supertabloid size. It's also similar in capability to the Epson Stylus Photo R3000 , which is our Editors' Choice near-dedicated photo printer for prosumers and professionals.

Both the Epson R3000 and the P600 can print on cut sheets as large as 13 by 19 inches, on printable optical discs, and on roll paper. Both can also print on an assortment of fine-art papers, as well as more common paper stock, and they can handle media up to 1.3mm thick, although you have to manually feed the thicker paper one sheet at a time using front-loading paper paths.

Some of the P600's other similarities to the Epson R3000 include support for Ethernet and Wi-Fi, a color LCD control panel, and the ability to hold two black ink cartridges—one for photo paper and one for matte paper—with the P600 adding the ability to automatically switch to the appropriate cartridge when you change the paper setting. Both printers also support mobile printing. If you connect either one directly to a network, you can connect to it through a network Wi-Fi access point to print from Android and iOS mobile devices.

Additional features for the P600 include printing through the cloud and Wi-Fi Direct, so you can connect directly to it and print from mobile devices even it's not on a network. You can also print larger output from roll paper, with a maximum print size of 13 by 129 inches.

Arguably the most significant difference between the two models is that the P600 uses a different ink system, with a new generation of inks that Epson touts for its "unprecedented black density." Without the output from the Epson R3000 on hand to compare to, I can't say whether there's a visible difference, but I can certainly confirm that the P600 did an excellent job with black-and-white photos in my tests.

Setup, Speed, and Output Quality

The P600 is bigger than typical inkjets, at 9 by 24.2 by 14.5 inches (HWD) with the paper trays closed and 16.7 by 24.2 by 32 inches with the input and output trays fully open. It's also heavy for an inkjet, at a hefty 35 pounds.

Once you find a spot for it, setup is mostly standard. The one unusual touch is that the ink system uses nine ink cartridges: cyan, yellow, magenta, light cyan, light magenta, photo black, matte black, light black, and light light black. The two levels of light black (or gray, if you prefer) supplement black to make it easier for the printer to create subtle shading in black-and-white images.

See How We Test Printers

For my tests, I connected the printer to a network using its Ethernet port and installed the driver on a Windows Vista system, which Epson doesn't officially support for the P600, but worked without any obvious problems in my tests. For our photo benchmark tests, I used the Ultra Premium Photo Paper Luster that Epson recommends for most general-purpose photo printing.

On our photo suite, the printer averaged 1 minute 1 second for a 4 by 6 and 1:53 for an 8 by 10 with its default Speed setting. Switching to the Maximum Quality setting roughly doubled the time, to an average of 2:05 for a 4 by 6 and 4:10 for an 8 by 10. Using the Speed setting, I timed a 13-by-19-inch photo at 4 minutes flat. With most printers, these numbers would tell you all you need to know about the printer's speed. With P600, however, the actual speed is complicated by other factors.

Usability Issues

Very much in the P600's favor, there's little gained from cutting the print speed in half by switching to Maximum Quality mode. Even with the driver set for Speed, the output quality for both graphics and photos is superb, and easily in the top tier for inkjets. The improvement for the Maximum Quality setting is visible, and will matter to serious professionals when they need to squeeze the best possible quality out of the printer, but for most people most of the time, the Speed setting should be more than good enough. For people without a trained eye the difference may not even be visible.

On the minus side, these numbers don't take some hidden extra time into account. When you give the first print command after turning the printer on, for example, it goes through some housekeeping tasks—cleaning the print head, for example—that I timed at 4:14 before it even feeds the paper to start printing. Similarly, if you switch between photo and matte paper, the printer has to switch the type of black ink it is using, which requires some internal preparation before the printing starts. I timed the process at 1:30 switching to matte black and 3:08 switching to photo black.

More troublesome is that I ran into problems feeding fine-art paper into the front tray. First, the printer does some internal setup when you switch between printing through the front tray and the rear 120-sheet paper feed. Then there's additional time needed for sliding the page into the printer, positioning it just so, and waiting for the printer to load the paper and get ready to print.

In my tests, I typically had to repeat the manual feed process three to four times for each sheet of paper—a problem I didn't run into when I tested the Epson R3000. More often than not, the printer would take the time to load the paper, and then put a message on the front-panel LCD that the paper was skewed, so I had to eject the page and start all over again. This happened no matter how carefully I lined the paper up and didn't happen any less often with practice. It can easily become a major frustration, especially if you're printing a lot of pages or are in a hurry. Epson confirms that this is an issue with some specific papers that tend to curl, and is working on improving its paper production to avoid the problem.

Still more of an issue in my tests was that settings in the driver for quality and paper type repeatedly, but unpredictably, kept switching back to the default values, so that I had to check the driver before and after every print job to make sure it printed with the settings I wanted. Epson says it was unable to reproduce this behavior in its tests, but suggests it may be related to our testing with Vista , which Epson doesn't test with because the printer doesn't officially support it.

In any case, if you plan to print with fine-art papers very often, you may be better off with the Epson R3000 because of its better paper handling for feeding pages manually. That said, however, the Epson SureColor P600 has a lot to recommend it, including gorgeous photo and graphic output quality and assorted features that the Epson R3000 lacks. If you need any of those additional features—from printing through the cloud, to Wi-Fi Direct, to printing on roll paper up to 13 by 129 inches—that can easily be enough to make the P600 your best choice.

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