This compact beauty packs a punch.

All-in-one printers have gotten a bad rap. Sure, they can print, scan, copy, and even fax, but usually their talents are a mile wide and an inch deep. But lucky for us, times have changed. All-in-one printers’ capabilities have improved, and the new do-everything machines are good-looking to boot. Beautifully finished in high-gloss black, Epson’s Artisan 800 all-in-one looks more like a fine musical instrument than the print/scan/copy/fax solution that it is.

The Artisan 800 prints from a computer or directly from cameras, USB drives, and memory cards. As a standalone printer, it can restore faded photos, remove red-eye, and print multiple images on a single page. Its dye-based inks—in six separate cartridges—print brilliant color images, which Epson says will last more than 95 years. The 4800 dpi (optical resolution) scanner-copier features OCR capability, and the copier can reduce or enlarge between 25 to 400 percent. The Artisan 800 is also Wi-Fi ready—a snap to set up—and features Ethernet networking built in.

The 7.8-inch touchscreen panel features a bright 3.5-inch LCD to allow editing in the printer prior to printing. Full pages of text took only 3 seconds on the Draft setting and 8 seconds on Normal. Paper is loaded into a two-tiered cassette, and media up to 44-inches long can be fed in manually.

Photo quality options include Draft, Standard, or Best with either uni- or bidirectional printing. Using the faster bidirectional mode, a 4x6 photo took 13, 23, and 56 seconds in Draft, Standard, and Best modes, respectively. Eight-by-tens at the same settings took 31 seconds; 1 minute, 7 seconds; and 2 minutes, 15 seconds, respectively. Eventually, we found that printing on Best was a waste of time and settled on Draft for everyday prints and Standard for enlargements. Epson says all modes use about the same amount of ink—it’s just dispersed differently: larger drops for Draft, while Best mode utilizes the smallest drops. We estimated ink costs at 77 cents per 8x10 photo and 21 cents for a 4x6 print.

We became addicted to printing Index Sheets. Each displayed thirty 1-by-1/4-inch thumbnail photos from our memory cards, then we selected images to print by filling in circles with a pen. After marking our answers—er, choices—we placed the sheet in the scanner, hit Start, and the prints rolled out. File names under each thumbnail made it easy to spot our selections when printing from our Mac