Incredible quality at a price
Written: May 28 '02
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Pros: Highest quality prints you will find - better than your photo shop
Cons: Expensive initial investment
The Bottom Line: If you are going to make a lot of prints that you need to frame, present or sell, this is the printer for you. Otherwise get the lower cost printer.
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| Marriard's Full Review: Epson Stylus Photo 2000P Inkjet Printer |
I waited a long time to buy this printer. It took a lot of personal justification to spend the money. In the end I got it refurbished directly from Epson's website.
The archival inks and the specialty papers add to the cost of printing with this printer. Although alternates exist, the quality is suspect and you are much better off staying with the Epson inks and papers and forget cheaper alternatives. After investing your money on a great printer, I can't see the justification for then taking the cheap way out on materials.
On the other hand I do a lot of prints - both for myself and for sale. The prints are truly spectacular on this printer - at least the equal of what the local photo store can do. Best of all - I now have complete control over the output. So I can play with colors, reprint easily if I get it wrong and a variety of other controls you do not have when you hand over your image to someone else to print for you. This has saved me days in terms of delivering what my customers needed, and may have actually won me some business be being able to deliver quality prints in a short time frame.
Setting this printer up was a breeze. It installed like any other printer on both Windows ME and Windows 2000 (as a network printer) and Windows XP (as the print server). Took me 5 minutes. You should note that the drivers for this printer that come with Windows XP and ME are NOT the ones that come with the printer or from Epson's website and do not allow access to all functions. You will need to make sure you have Epson drivers or you will not get the quality you are looking for in this printer.
Different to most printers, Epson has added a separate application to do a extra Print Preview before sending the image to the printer if you are so inclined. I print primarily from Photoshop and PaintShopPro, and this feature is extremely useful to ensure I didn't make a huge mistake. I have caught myself accidently trying to print an image as original size, instead of printing the print size I needed.
This printer is for prints only - any other use would be throwing money away. The only text I have printed with this printer has occasionally been titles of the images being printed.
The fact that this printer takes a long time to print these images thus became irrelevant to me. I would much rather the printer take its time and produce a perfect image than rush it. This does however make this printer less suited for a commercial photo store where speed may be important, and more suited to an individual photographer. It is actually interesting to watch the printer slowly put your image onto paper.
I am concerned that this might be the only printer to use these inks and papers and I have been stocking up pretty heavily now that prices have dropped to a reasonable level. I would love to see Epson put into production another similar printer. This is not so I can buy it, but rather to ensure the supply of material for this printer.
After a lot of calculations, which did not include sales of prints, I figured that the break even point purely in money terms was about 100 prints at 8x10 - less at 11x14. If you have no plans to make at least that many prints, this is not the printer for you.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 635
Operating System: Windows
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Epinions.com ID:
Marriard
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Member: Paul Osmond
Location: Somewhere Warm, Florida
Reviews written: 26
Trusted by: 0 members
About Me:
An Australian living in the USA working for a company based out of Canada.
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