Epson Expression Photo HD XP-15000 review: create 13x19-inch photo prints in a jiffy

Epson has long been one of the biggest names in inkjet printing. It continues to have a widespread range of models that include some of the best inkjet printers, the best portable printers, and the best photo printers. The XP-15000 looks barely larger than some A4/letter printers but can output borderless photos of up to A3+/13x19 inches in size. It’s an easy fit for large-format home photo printing, where space is often limited. The printer is competitively priced but runs on conventional cartridges rather than being one of Epson’s ‘EcoTank’ printers, the latter having relatively large in tanks that are replenished with bottled ink. As I’ll come to next, that can have a major impact on the total cost of ownership, especially if you create large-format photo prints on a regular basis.

Epson XP-15000: Specifications

Epson XP-15000: Price

The Epson Expression Photo HD XP-15000 is relatively inexpensive for an A3+/13x19-inch photo printer, costing around $400 / £330 / AU$549. That compares favorably against more ‘professional’ A3+ dye-based models like the Canon Pixma PRO-200 at $600 / £459 / AU$799. In fact, at the time of writing this review, the XP-15000 was discounted to just $250 in the USA. Either way, it’s a lot less expensive than the Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8550, which sells for $750 / £780 / AU$1,149. However, cartridge-based printers like the XP-15000 can be notoriously expensive to run, compared with bottle-fed printers. In this case, ink works out to around $2.25 / £2.23 / AU$4.07 per milliliter. That’s nearly 10 times the price of bottled ink for the ET-8550, which costs about $0.23 / £0.29 / AU$0.50 per milliliter. There’s another catch in that the ‘setup’ cartridges supplied with the XP-15000 don’t last very long, and a full set of replacement ‘XL’ cartridges costs around $135 / £134 / AU$244, which you’ll have to buy sooner rather than later. By stark contrast, the ET-8550 comes with sufficient ink for printing up to 2,300 6x4-inch photos.

Epson XP-15000: Design & Handling

The XP-15000 is first and foremost a printer for creating high-quality photos on glossy or luster photo paper at sizes of up to A3+ or 13x19 inches. Typical of the breed, it runs on dye-based rather than pigment-based inks, the latter being better suited to matte photo paper and fine art media. The advantage of dye-based inks is that they’re fully absorbed beneath the top protective layer of glossy and luster papers, achieving a really smooth finish with no gloss-differential or ‘bronzing’.

There are six dye-based inks in the line-up, so you might be thinking that cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks are joined by light cyan and light magenta. That’s a time-honored tradition for Epson that goes back decades, as it adds to the color space or ‘gamut’ for more effective, photo-realistic printing. However, the XP-15000 bucks the trend by adding red and grey inks to the usual CMYK. The overall line-up has been designed not only to extend the gamut, but to make the printer more effective for black & white photo printing, with greater tonal range and neutrality.

Setting up the printer is pretty straightforward. There’s a few packing pieces and strips of blue tape to remove, after which you simply switch on the printer and follow the on-screen instructions. It basically boils down to installing the ink cartridges in the print head and then running routines for a nozzle check and print head alignment. After than, you can connect the printer to Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi Direct, or to a computer via USB. The whole process only takes about half an hour.

I like the design of the XP-15000. It’s relatively compact and lightweight for an A3+/13x19-inch printer, measuring 479 x 370 x 159mm and weighing 8.5kg (just under 19 inches wide and 17.6lb). Compared with some competitors, it’s easy to find enough desktop or tabletop space for it.

There’s not much extra space needed around the back, as the rear paper feed for large and specialist media is vertical. The paper support extends in stages, ideal for use with the likes of 6x4-inch, A4/letter and full A3 or A3+ paper.

You do need to leave a fair bit of space at the front, as the motorized output tray extends for printing. Even so, a clever touch is that it only extends as much as it needs to, to accommodate printing on different sizes of paper.

The front panel of the printer plays host to the onboard control panel. This is based around a 6.1cm color LCD and various pushbuttons. It might seem a bit old-fashioned in the ‘touchscreen’ age but I found the interface to be very intuitive and easy to live with. However, I’m a bit disappointed there’s no memory card slot for standalone photo printing.

Moving around to the back, the printer features an auto duplex unit for double-sided printing. This is naturally of more use for printing mono and color documents rather than photo output, but it’s something that the printer makes a good stab at. I’ll come back to this later in my ‘performance’ section.

Epson XP-15000: Performance

When it comes to performance, the key factor for any photo printer is the quality of the actual photo prints. It’s not the whole story, but the best place to start. The XP-15000 impressed me with its lifelike and natural color rendition. I’ve criticized Epson’s automatic ‘Photo Enhancement’ feature in the past, which is switched on by default in the printer driver, for delivering overly vibrant and contrasty prints. In this case, however, it worked very well, adding a touch of drama to landscape shots and an appealing warmth to skin tones. Naturally, if you have a color calibrated monitor screen and you’re entirely confident in your image editing abilities, you can switch Photo Enhancement off and what you see on screen will closely match what you get on paper. True to its claims, the line-up of six inks delivers a broad color space and is also good for black & white photo printing.

The following screen gallery shows a selection of Windows printer driver options for the XP-15000.

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With money and space at a premium in most homes, most of us only want to buy and run one printer. Although the XP-15000 doesn’t feature a pigment black ink, it delivers surprisingly rich and sharp mono text for document printing on regular plain paper, and the same goes for color documents.

Speed can be of the essence for document printing and Epson claims print speeds of 9.2 pages per minute for mono and 9 pages per minute for color. In the fastest print quality mode, this can actually rise to as much as 29ppm. In my tests, I found the printer took 8 seconds for first page output in mono and 10 seconds for a color DTP page, both in standard quality mode, which are pretty swift speeds.

The printer isn’t blisteringly fast for photo printing but pretty quick nonetheless. Epson claims it can output a 6x4-inch print in as little as 27 seconds, but I tend to stick to ‘normal’ or ‘high’ quality modes for printing photos. I found that there was virtually no discernable difference in the quality of photo output at normal and high settings. Speeds were quite different however. Creating borderless prints at various sizes took 40s and 1m 14s for 6x4-inch photo prints at normal and high quality modes respectively, 1m 46s and 3m 07s for A4, and 2m 58s and 5m 12s for A3, again in normal and high quality modes respectively. Ultimately, if I can create a borderless A3 print in about 3 minutes that’s going to be of great quality and last a lifetime, I’d call that quick.

I’d also factor running costs into performance. After all, if prints are too pricey to create, you can be put off making them. For my money that puts a dent in a printer’s overall performance for making photo prints. Naturally, the amount of ink you use in creating a photo can vary considerably, depending on each actual image.

Averaging everything out, you can expect ink costs for the XP-15000 (not including paper) to work out to around $0.30 / £0.30 / AU$0.53 for 6x4-inch photos, $1.16 / £1.14 / $2.11 for A4/letter photos, and $3 / £3 / $5.50 for A3+ photos. That’s pretty average for a cartridge-based photo printer but, again, much pricier than using an EcoTank printer like the Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8550.

Epson XP-15000: Verdict

For a large-format A3+/13x19-inch photo printer, I think that the XP-15000 is conveniently compact, lightweight and easy to live with. The color screen and pushbutton controls are intuitive and a good alternative to the now-more-common provision of a touchscreen. Photo quality itself is good for black & white and highly impressive for color, and prints of various sizes are pretty quick to create. The printer also does a decent job of printing mono and color documents on plain paper, complete with an auto duplex facility. The only downsides are that cartridge-based ink is expensive to buy and that there’s no built-in scanner nor a memory card slot for direct, standalone printing.

Alternatives

The Canon Pixma PRO-200 (PRO-200S in the USA) is a more specialist, pro-grade dye-based inkjet printer that runs on 8 separate ink cartridges. It’s a rather more weighty affair, measuring 639 x 379 x 200mm and weighing 14.1kg, and is more costly to buy at around $600 / £459 / AU$799.

The Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8550 is designed to be more of a multi-purpose printer, running on a pigment-based black ink along with five dye-based inks for photo output, comprising cyan, magenta, yellow, photo black and grey. It’s considerably more expensive to buy at around $750 / £780 / AU$1,149 but replacement bottled ink makes it much cheaper to run.