About.com Rating

This product’s name, the “SureColor P600 Wide Format Inkjet Printer” (on Epson’s Web site, anyway), is somewhat misleading. Instead of being merely a “Wide Format Inkjet Printer,” the P600 is Epson’s top-of-the-line, $799.99 photo printer—with the ability to print borderless 13"x19" prints and panoramas over 10 feet long.

No, this isn’t your parent’s inkjet printer, nor is it your average consumer-grade photo printer, such as Canon’s $199.99 Pixma MG7520 Photo Inkjet All-in-One, either.

Design & Features

Epson says that this printer is designed for professional and semi-professional photographers, including, I suspect, hobbyist. Hence, it doesn’t look a lot like the company’s consumer-grade photo printers, such as the $349.99-list Expression Photo XP-860 Small-in-One. At 24.2 inches across, 32 inches from front to back (with the trays extended), 16.7 inches high, and weighing in at 33 pounds, this is no desktop printer. It’s much bigger and sturdier, for one thing.

Instead of the six ink tanks found in most high-end consumer-grade photo printers (like those listed above), the P600 deploys nine of Epson’s UltraChrome HD inks, which, in addition to being incredibly high-tech ink, includes four shades of black. As for paper handling, it has three input sources: a high-capacity, cut-sheet feeder; a single-sheet, front-in, front-out thick paper path for fine art media up to 1.3 mm thick; and a rear-mounted 2-inch core roll feeder.

In addition to being able to churn out excellent photos, panoramas, flyers, poster, and so on, it can also print standard, everyday business documents.

However, at a per-page cost of operation, or cost per page, so far off the chart competitively that…well, you’d be better off, much better off, if you just buy a document printer, too. In other words, don’t plan on using this printer to print more than, say, a few pages a month. The P600 wasn't really designed to be a document printer.

That said, in addition to printing exceptional photographs, you can connect to the P600 via Wi-fi, Ethernet, or USB, as well as various cloud sites, including Google Cloud Print, EpsonNet and Epson Connect (which includes Epson’s own cloud site and several others). It also supports Wi-Fi Direct for connecting mobile devices directly to the printer without either device being connected to a router. Not supported, on the other hand, is Near Field-Communication (NFC) for touch-to-print connectivity. (Click here for a list of today’s mobile printing features.)

The P600 has no scanner, so no need for an automatic document feeder (ADF). But it does come with a caddy for printing labels on appropriately surfaced CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs, which can come in handy if you catalog your photos on CDs or DVDs.

Performance, Paper Handling, Print Quality

Photo printers typically print photos fast and documents slow. And though I don’t recommend that you print documents on this photo printer as a budget consideration, that’s pretty much how this one works, too. In fact, Epson claims you can print an 11x14-inch photograph in about 153 seconds, or two-and-a-half minutes.

Mentioned earlier, this printer’s three different paper paths allow for a wide range of versatility, including printing on extra-thick, card-like paper ideal for printing elegant wide-format photos, posters, and other fine art. Epson provides a respectable selection of premium papers, including metallic and velvet, for further enhancing your creations.

And let’s not forget the ultra-long posters and panoramas you can print with the paper roll. It too comes in various flavors, such as glossy, matte, and so on. Epson may say that this printer is for professional photographers, but it just looks like a lot of fun to me.