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Epson Artisan 810

Roberto Baldwin — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:14:57 -0600

All-in-one printers do everything, but usually at the expense of excelling at any single job. Not so with the Epson Artisan 810, which quickly spits out high-quality photographic prints and also ably takes care of your scanning, copying, and standard printing needs.

The printer uses a tray that accommodates a variety of different paper sizes, including legal, 8.5x14 standard, and various user-definable sizes, which we didn’t have any problems switching between. It also includes a dedicated slot for 4x6 or 5x7 media. You can also print on ink jet–ready CDs and DVDs. The Artisan features print resolutions up to 5760x1440 dpi.

The 810 is speedy--by the time we walked across the room to even wait for our prints, they were already done. The printer has an RPM (Resolution Performance Management) mode that will give you the highest-quality prints available, but it comes at the expense of speed. We noticed the greatest improvements using RPM mode when printing grayscale images with smooth gradients between light and dark. The regular photo mode was more than adequate for point-and-shoot images, but higher-res DSLR shots also showed marked improvement with RPM prints.

Back in Black.

For standard document printing, the Epson produced crisp fonts and pages nearly shot out of the printer. The 810 gave us between 37 to 40 PPM, depending on the amount of included text, and churned out 4x6 photo prints in 8 to 12 seconds. Double-sided prints took longer, but the printer features a built-in duplexer.

The Artisan 810, like most printers, also serves as a card reader and gives you the ability to print directly from memory cards without a computer. We especially like the ability to print out a contact sheet with thumbnails and choose which images to print full size. You can also add frames and create greeting cards directly from the printer itself--a nice touch if you need a card pronto.

All of this memory card–based printing is controlled from the 7.8-inch touchscreen. The screen is home to the easy-to-use UI that controls printer settings and its many features. Setting up the printer, including Wi-Fi printing, was quick and painless.

Ink2image Trio Bulk Ink System

Arthur Bleich — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 12:30:00 -0500

Filling your own inkjet printer cartridges can slash inks costs by 60 to 85 percent, save oil that’s used to transport them, and cut down on the hundreds of millions of plastic empties that clog U.S. landfills each year. And no, Virginia, using refillables won’t actually void your printer’s warranty--despite what store clerks might tell you.

Ink2image’s Trio Bulk Ink System offers innovative replacement cartridges--along with premium Lyson inks--that fit 30 Epson desktop printers and several HP models. Each has a refillable tank that snaps into a sleeve, which is then inserted into the printer.

Whether it pays to switch depends on your average print output. Since Lyson inks have a shelf life of two years for dye and 18 months for pigment, you’d need to roll out 360 dye or 660 pigment 8x10 prints (or their equivalents) per year. If you print that much you’re in the money.

Using a Stylus Photo R280, we chose a $190 Trio system that included Lyson Fotonix XG archival dye inks color-matched to Epson’s Claria inkset.

Don't let the needles scare you. Refilling your own ink cartridge is a snap.

The kit included six sleeves with ink-level-reporting chips, eighteen 13-millileter inserts (a trio for each color, so you don’t need to refill immediately when a cartridge needs replacing), and six 4-ounce (119ml) bottles of each color having the same ink volume as 102 standard 7-millileter R280 cartridges or 64 high-capacity 11-millileter ones--a savings of $915 and $770, respectively. Also included were six filling syringes and a pair of too-big latex gloves (tip: get some tight-fitting ones).

Since the supplied inks are compatible with Epson’s, you can use them together until your printer’s original cartridges run dry. Just remember to remove the air plugs on the Trios, or they won’t work. You’ll also need to run a cleaning cycle or two after the first fill-up to expunge trapped air, but it’s not necessary after subsequent refills.

Ink2image guarantees that tanks can be refilled at least 10 times before they wear out but says they’ve routinely doubled that number. Replacements cost $5. They claim they haven’t had any monitoring-chip failures yet, but if that happens, $10 buys a new sleeve. Single, archival 4-ounce ink bottles are $19; plain-vanilla costs $9.95. Extra fill and air plugs are also available.

Our test prints using Epson and Lyson inksets at various printer-driver settings showed the two to be virtually identical, with the Lyson output being slightly more color-accurate to our eye. The chips on the Trio sleeves that send ink-level data to the printer worked without a hitch. Paper profiles for those who use imaging programs to color-manage their output are in the works; in the meantime, we found Epson’s profiles worked just fine.

Epson Stylus Photo R2880

Arthur Bleich — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 04:30:00 -0500

The R2880 churns out stunning prints at a good price.

There’s good and bad news about Epson’s wide-carriage Stylus Photo R2880, successor to the four-year-old Stylus Photo R2400. First, the good: It’s more robust than the R2400 and puts out the most gorgeous color and black-and-white prints up to 13x19 inches (13x44 inches for panoramas) we’ve ever seen. The bad: Photo Black and Matte Black cartridges still require swapping when using different paper surfaces.

The R2880 also weighs almost 27 pounds and takes up quite a bit of space: Its physical footprint is 24.3 inches wide by 12.7 inches deep (20 inches with its top-loading sheet feeder extended). You’ll need even more room behind it, though, if you use roll paper (holders included) or load single or heavier (up to 1.3mm thick) art-type papers through front or rear single-sheet feed slots. A tray for printing on specially surfaced CDs and DVDs comes with the printer and a pair of USB 2.0 ports allows a two-computer connection, though only one can print at a time.

Following Epson’s quick-start guide, we shook each cartridge a few times and then snapped in Light-Light Black, Vivid Light Magenta, Light Cyan, Light Black, Photo Black, Cyan, Vivid Magenta, and Yellow in that order (we kept Matte Black close by for later use). A press of the Ink button fired up the printer, after which we installed the software without a hitch before connecting the R2880 to our Mac.

We began by printing our 8x10 inch test image on Epson’s Premium Photo Paper Glossy at the three resolutions suitable for photos: SuperFine 1440, Photo 1440, and SuperPhoto 5670. Each has a High Speed option that allows the printhead to lay down ink in both directions of travel, instead of just one; we ran each resolution in both modes.
Unidirectional output speeds were: SuperFine 1440, 3minutes, 12 seconds; Photo 1440, 4 minutes, 39 seconds; SuperPhoto 5760, 8 minutes, 7 seconds. Bidirectional times for the same resolutions were 1 minute, 36 seconds; 2 minutes, 29 seconds; and 4 minutes, 14 seconds, respectively. Eyeballing our six prints carefully, all appeared equal in quality. But looking at them through a powerful loupe revealed some minuscule variations. Nevertheless, Photo 1440 at High Speed gave us excellent results on most papers, along with reasonable printing times.

The R2880 is one of the quietest printers we’ve used--we could hardly hear it at 6 feet away. Prints show no color shifting (metamerism), color layering or bronzing, and Epson’s Ultrachrome K3 pigment inks have a predicted print lightfastness of up to 205 years under glass, but humidity, heat, and air contaminants could shorten that.

Most impressive was the quality of prints we output on different Epson, Red River, and Hahnemühle papers using the R2880’s Advanced Black-and-White mode. They easily equaled or surpassed the finest silver halide prints we’ve seen, offering rich, deep blacks with an extraordinary tonal range that could only be described as stunning. It was also easy to simulate sepia, platinum, selenium, and other traditional toners.

Ink consumption when printing uni- or bidirectionally at SuperFine 1440 or Photo 1440 was about the same. At $13.29 per cartridge, we calculated the average cost of ink for an 8x10 inch print at those four options to be 80 cents ($2.50 for a 13x19 inch photo) though it could be higher or lower depending on the percentage of dark or light areas in an image. SuperPhoto 5760 used about twice as much ink when producing museum-quality, exhibition images on fine art papers.

Epson WorkForce 600

Leslie Ayers — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 03:47:00 -0600

It does everything but make coffee—and looks great doing it.

Rarely do we run across an all-in-one printer as capable, affordable, and easy to use as the Epson WorkForce 600. On top of that, the device—which prints, scans, copies, and faxes—is attractive enough to share desk space with a MacBook Pro, iMac, or Mac Pro, without sticking out like a soccer mom at a death-metal concert.

Setup is a breeze, although you should decide from the outset whether you want to network the WorkForce 600 via Wi-Fi or a wired 10/100 Mbps Ethernet. If you just want to connect the printer to one Mac to get started right away, it’s a simple matter of installing the Epson software, connecting the device to your Mac via a USB cable (not included). Photos print beautifully on the machine at impressive speeds, depending on the print size and options selected. Most 300-dpi 4-by-6 images we printed at Best Photo setting (with High Speed also checked) came out in about a minute and a half, give or take a few seconds. Larger shots, such as an 8-by-10 portrait with a highly saturated background, took longer: 2 minutes, 42 seconds, in that case. Copies of full-color presentation slides printed nicely and took just 18 seconds apiece. And scanning the same color slides to PDF files took less than 30 seconds each. Printed photos came out beautifully and showed true-to-life color and accurate skin tones.

The device also offers plenty of options for bypassing a computer and printing directly from a flash memory card, PictBridge-compatible camera, or even a USB flash drive—though the USB slot on the front of the device requires a drive with a slim form factor, due to the port being inset from the face of the printer. Because of its networking abilities and built-in Wi-Fi, the WorkForce 600 is ideal for a small business or workgroup of a handful of computers. But for only $200, it’s an awesome home printer too. It doesn’t handle paper wider than 8.5 inches, but for most standard photo print sizes, including panoramic shots, the WorkForce 600 more than pulls its own weight without making you wait, delivering drop-dead gorgeous prints and offering a slew of business-savvy options, like double-sided printing, optical character recognition (OCR), and enlargements up to 400 percent.

Epson Artisan 800

Arthur Bleich — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 03:53:00 -0600

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

HP Photosmart D5460

Leslie Ayers — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 03:07:00 -0500

Think you can’t trust your precious memories to a hundred-dollar printer? You’re in good hands with HP.

Given how large the universe of $100 photo printers has grown, it can be difficult to decide exactly which one to throw your 100 bones toward. Do you honor brand loyalty to Epson, HP, or Canon—and when you choose among those, which model do you go for? If you’re already an HP loyalist—or even if you’re not—the HP Photosmart D5460 is a worthy choice for outputting all your favorite snaps, as well as standard Word docs, Google Maps directions, and other home or small-business print jobs. It can print directly on printable CDs and DVDs too.

For printing basic docs, the D5460 is impressively speedy—spitting out a two-page full-color PDF in 38 seconds; 4-by-6-inch snapshots set on Best quality took a bit longer, though: 2 minutes, 9 seconds. But the instantly dry prints were worth the wait, and the photos looked great, with true-to-life skin tones, bright reds, blues, and greens, and deep blacks.

Our only gripe about printing photos with the D5460 was the kludgy print dialogs presented by HP’s driver software. We had to enlist a friend’s help to figure out how to tell the printer to use photo print settings and to pull sheets of HP Advanced Photo Paper from the 20-sheet 4-by-6-inch photo tray. The more-confusing-than-necessary process required us to press Command-P from within Photoshop, select the printer, click Print, then in the resulting dialog, choose Paper Type/Quality, then choose our specific type of photo paper, select the photo tray, and so on—way more clicks and selections than we’d like just to print a pic to send to Grandma.

That said, if you’d rather print directly from your camera’s removable memory card (the printer takes almost every format in existence), you can certainly do so, using the printer’s buttons and the 1.5-inch LCD, though we much prefer printing from within a photo-editing app like Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. Printing directly from a card is truly a cinch, with the added bonus that your Mac will recognize the card when you insert it into the printer, and you can import your photos into iPhoto (or, if you prefer, launch Image Capture) from there.

The D5460’s gorgeous prints are thanks to a new 5-ink system, which means the standard lineup of Vivera ink cartridges includes two blacks, plus magenta, cyan, and yellow. We printed several dozen 4-by-6-inch shots without hearing a peep about low ink levels. The cartridges cost $9.99 each (approximately 250 pages) or $14.99 for an extra-large size (around 750 pages).

HP Photosmart Pro B8850

Arthur Bleich — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 03:21:00 -0500

It handles a variety of paper types, but you’ll have to play musical media trays.

Things that go bump in the night: ghosts, ghouls, and the new HP Photosmart Pro B8850. If this printer sits idle for more than a day, it powers on, wakes up, and checks each of its 4,884 ink nozzles to make sure they’re unclogged so it can be ready to go when you are. Then it powers down and goes back to sleep.

Unlike most of its competitors that use gobs of ink to clear just a few clogged nozzles, the B8850 detects exactly which nozzles need clearing and uses only a miniscule amount of ink to do it. The printer even assigns spare nozzles as stand-ins if some become clogged during printing, so your image won’t be ruined. Very smart.

Setup went without a hitch, including a calibration routine that fine-tunes the printer’s color accuracy. Pigment-based HP Vivera ink cartridges are supplied for eight inkwells: Photo Black, Light Gray, Matte Black, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Light Magenta, and Light Cyan. When coupled with HP papers, their fade-resistance is impressive: up to 200 years according to the manufacturer. Although replacement cartridges are costly ($34), they hold almost twice as much ink (27ml) as those for competing printers, saving you both time and money.

Output was superb—as good or better than professional lab-made prints. Using the B8850’s Best setting (2400 x 1200 dpi) we printed over two hundred 13-by-19-inch photos without a paper jam and, for an encore, rolled out several 13-by-39-inch panoramas (maximum paper length is 44 inches). We also output more than 50 black-and-white photos with rich blacks and a beautiful range of gray midtones—the Grayscale option allows printing with black and gray inks only or with a composite of blacks and subtle colors.

The HP driver’s paper settings were sometimes confusing. For example, is Advanced Photo Paper glossy, luster, matte, or something else? (It’s glossy.) Third-party papers such as premium Hahnemühle and modestly priced Red River yielded excellent prints using either the B8850’s driver or with Photoshop in command. If you want to use ICC paper profiles for precise color control, there are more than 60 available for different paper brands at HP’s website (www.hp.com), along with screenshots and detailed instructions on how to use them.

Light- and medium-weight papers are loaded face down into a front main tray, drawn into the printer, curved 180 degrees, printed, and then rolled out onto a heavy output tray directly above it. The output tray partially blocks access to the main tray, making loading large single sheets difficult. HP suggests removing and replacing the output tray each time, but that became a hassle; we eventually replaced it with an easier-to-use piece of foam core.

Media heavier than 220gsm (grams per square meter), such as some watercolor, canvas, and photo rag papers, feed straight through a specialty media tray that swings out from the front of the printer. But enough space is needed behind the printer to allow for nearly the full length of the paper, as it’s first pulled in and then fed back out onto the same tray. We had to move the printer almost 2 feet from the wall when making 13-by-19-inch prints. If you regularly use long, heavy papers, you’ll need a 3-foot-deep clearance or you’ll have to turn the printer sideways.

Epson R1900

Arthur Bleich — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 22:53:59 -0500

“Landscape” takes on new meaning with Epson’s R1900.

If high-gloss color photos turn you on, the new Epson R1900 will give you a real thrill. Using long-lasting pigment inks and a special gloss optimizer, the wide-format printer puts out shiny, eye-popping photos up to 13 by 19 inches that’ll bring on the oohs and aahs.

If you already own its predecessor, the R1800, there’s no urgent need to trade up, however. The difference in output quality between the two inkjet printers is very subtle, except when it comes to flesh tones. For those, the R1900 has new orange ink formulated to capture the color nuances of lighter skin tones. In combination with its other inks—photo or matte black, cyan, red, yellow, and magent-a—the results are impressive. Adding gloss optimizer to the mix virtually eliminates the topographical effect of color layering that can occur when pigment inks are used on glossy paper.

Epson has paid attention to small details too, such as integrating handles in the R1900’s wrapping so that you can more easily lift its nearly 30 pounds from the box. There are twin USB 2.0 ports (but no FireWire or Ethernet) at the rear that allow two computers to connect to the printer, in addition to a front port for direct-from-camera PictBridge printing.

After powering on the R1900, we inserted the ink cartridges and connected a USB cable (not included) to our Mac. Then, we installed the Epson driver and used the Mac’s Printer Setup Utility to get the printer running.

We first let the printer’s stock driver run the show— with excellent results. Then, after calibrating our monitor with ColorVision’s Spyder 3 Pro, we downloaded a special set of premium-paper profiles from Epson’s site that enables Photoshop (and other color management programs) to accomplish more precise color output. The resulting prints were awesome.

The R1900 runs quietly, handles borderless output, and is extremely versatile. The printer can use roll paper via included holders, prints on CD and DVD disks, and handles thicker-than-normal papers through an easily attached loader. It also prints well on oversized third-party media: Red River’s 13-by-38-inch-long panorama papers rolled through smoothly.

Output quality is determined by three settings: Photo, Best Photo, and Photo RPM (Resolution Performance Management), each with a high-speed option. We printed a 20MB, 8-by-10 TIFF image at 300ppi on Epson’s premium glossy paper and logged output times from when the R1900 began to print. Our results with the Photo setting were unacceptable, however. Banding was evident across the image and it actually took longer (2 minutes, 32 seconds) than the Best Photo setting (2 minutes, 16 seconds). Selecting Best Photo at High Speed, the R1900 cranked a print out in 1 minute, 39 seconds. Photo RPM took 5 minutes, 16 seconds, but setting it to High Speed reduced the output time to 2 minutes, 44 seconds. Our advice is to start with Best Photo/High Speed and bump up the quality settings only if you don’t like the first results.

We also ran a test print to determine ink consumption—a tricky endeavor since photos rarely use the same amount of each ink color. After printing 35 glossy 8-by-10 prints, the Gloss Optimizer cartridge needed replacement, and at 50 prints the Photo Black, Cyan, and Magenta ran out (the other colors were still half full). We estimated ink costs at about 1.5 cents per square inch ($1.20 for an 8-by-10).

The R1900 also prints good-looking black-and-white glossy and matte prints. We noticed very slight metamerism (color casts under different light sources) with certain papers—which occurs when colored inks are mixed with black to achieve certain gray tones.