Since the invention of the four-color process, generally all colors have been created using, you guessed it, just four inks: cyan, magenta, yellow and black, also known as CMYK. Although this combo works in print shops throughout the world, it's been a bit challenging for inkjets.

Looking for a fix, inkjet makers built five-ink printers, then six and seven. Now there are eight. For the R800, Epson's lineup includes the traditional four, a second "photo" black, plain red and blue, plus a clear "gloss optimizer."

Inkjet's biggest problem, at least in my opinion, has been the color blue. Jeans, cloudless skies and bodies of water have a way of looking unnatural when printed. The R800's blue cartridge (more like a navy) deepens and provides detail to broad strokes of blue, making them less eerie. Last summer I took a picture of a camera crew interviewing the Yankees' Jason Giambi. The first baseman's warm-up jacket and hat, printed using HP's six-color PSC 2410 Photosmart printer, takes on a KC Royals hue; the R800 makes it appropriately darker, an NYPD blue. (The extra red behaves in a similar fashion, providing a subtler alternative to magenta.)

Another inkjet problem is the outline effect, stark contrasts between foreground images and soft backgrounds. I once took a picture in Barcelona of my girlfriend standing beside a seaside sculpture (Rebecca Horn's 1992 L'Estel Ferit). In the HP printout, both stand out against the surf as if they were digitally inserted, and the sculpture has a distinct halo of white along its top and right side. The shot printed from the R800 has more natural contrasts, and the halo is noticeably absent.

The gloss optimizer is designed to eradicate that holographic look inkjet prints often end up with. That is, different picture elements stand out differently on the page itself, so that when you hold the print diagonal to the light, you see a sort of ink topography. The gloss is supposed to even out the topography, filling in white holes left by the absence of colored inks. Does it work? I say yes. The nine shots I printed all have the evenness of an old-world photomat print. Remember those?