Epson Stylus Photo 1280 Inkjet Printer
Written: May 14 '02
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Great pictures and easy to operate
Cons: Ink cartridges are too small
The Bottom Line: Excellent photo printer and I would recommend it to everyone
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| opinionated3's Full Review: Epson Stylus Photo 1280 |
The nice thing about when the owner of the company recently upgraded all of our computer equipment. She also decided that we needed new printers and I am writing this review on our new presentation printer. Up until now we have been printing all of our full color brochures and letterhead on an older Epson Stylus 3000 Inkjet printer.
So when it came time to replace the Epson Stylus 3000, we had to find a printer that was going to be better for our printing needs. After about a week of research I came across the printer for us. It was the Epson Sytlus Photo 1280 Inkjet printer and as you will soon find out it was the perfect printer for us.
The Printer
Since we were replacing a wide format inkjet printer, the replacement also had to be a wide format printer. The Stylus 1280 is capable of printing on paper up to 13" wide and 19" long. This allows us to print 4 sided brochures up to 8.5 x 11 size format. The Epson Stylus 3000 inkjet was also capable of printing 11x17 format, but the biggest difference is the Stylus Photo 1280 is capable of borderless printing and the Stylus 3000 couldn't.
Print Quality and Speed
Since I print mostly high quality full color brochures I was very interested in this printers ability to print great quality prints and also print fairly fast. The speed rating according to Epson is 4"x6" photo 54 seconds, 8"x 10" photo 1min. 50 seconds and black text at 9 ppm. Though I never sat there with a stop watch timing the speed of the printer I can say that is pretty close. Those times are also dependent on several variables you need to consider. The type of paper and the print quality setting will affect the speed and quality if the print.
Every Epson printer comes with a software package that helps you control the printer. Along with printer settings, there is also a very convenient ink level indicator which keeps track of the amount of each color in the cartridges. The most important function the software performs is that it allows you to chose what type of paper will you using. It will also allow you to chose between speed and quality of print.
The Epson Stylus Photo 1280 is capable of printing on a wide range of paper. I'm not going to mention the entire list of paper that will work with this printer, but I will mention some of them. Like any inkjet printer plain and bond paper is standard use. However Epson Stylus Photo inkjet printers perform best on Epson Premium Glossy Photo paper. I have also used quite a bit of Epson Heavyweight Matte finish paper with excellent results.
The print quality is dependent on the resolution setting for the specific print job. The maximum resolution of the printer is 2880 x 720 and those numbers represent dots per inch. The only way this printer will achieve the maximum resolution is on Epson Premium Glossy Photo paper. You select the paper type through the printer control software which pops up when you chose the option to print. The actual range of print resolution is 2880 x 720 to 180 x 180 dots per inch.
One of the main reasons why this printer is classified as a "Photo" printer is due to the 6 colors it uses to create the photo images. The standard black cartridge and the 5 color single cartridge contains cyan, light cyan, magenta, light magenta and yellow. The light colors allows the printer to create more precise colors. How it actually mixes the colors I really don't know, but what I do know that it creates some spectacular prints.
Setting up the printer was a breeze, using the CD and the installation poster that is included with the printer. I had no problem setting up this printer on one of our workstations. The only thing we had to supply was the parallel printer cable and it connected to the back of the printer and PC. Once the software and driver were installed we did a quick test print and we were up and printing.
The CD is loaded with Windows drivers for most of the available operating systems with the exception of WindowsXP. It also has Mac drivers, but since we don't have any Mac's I can't speak about it's actual compatibility.
The Epson Stylus Photo printer has a 100 sheet paper tray located at the front of the printer and it has a 50 sheet output tray also located in the front. It also has a feature that the Epson Stylus 3000 printer has, a paper roll feed on the back. This allows the printer to print up to 44" long and 13" wide.
Due to it's large size you will need to arrange for a large working surface for the printer. If you plan on using the roll feed you will need to have the back of the printer accessible for loading the roll paper. This can be a little tricky sometimes. Especially when you are dealing with curling paper and a straight paper entrance. Just like any printer, once you get the hang of it things run a lot smoother. The actual dimensions of the printer are 24" wide x 12.2" deep x 6.9" tall and weighs 18.48 lb. So you can see that it maybe rather large in size but it is not really heavy.
What I like about the printer.
I love this printer and it does everything that I needed it to do. Being in sales I print all kinds of different presentation material. I print 4 page brochures on 11" x 17" tabloid paper and I print 4"x6" post cards for mailings. This printer does all those jobs with ease. I love the photo printing, all the colors are so amazingly crisp and clear. The text printing is of equal quality since I print a lot of mixed graphics and text prints.
What I dislike about this printer
The cartridges are to small and they don't last, especially if you are printing large 8"x10" or 11"x17" photos. This is because there is only two cartridges on this printer, one black and one 5 color cartridge. Unlike on the Epson 3000 which uses 4 large cartridges, which allows you to print many pages without running out of ink. According to Epson the ink cartridges should last 540 pages at 5% coverage for the black and the color should last 330 pages at 15% coverage. As you can probably guess if you print a lot of color photo's or gray scale graphics the cartridges won't last you very long.
In conclusion if you are looking for a wide format photo printer I would recommend this printer to you. The price might be steep at $500.00, but think of the alternative if you print a lot large size pictures or posters.
Recommended:
Yes
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