Like the Budgie Squawked, Cheep
Written: Mar 11 '03
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Pros: Cheap, fast, great prints, good ink length
Cons: Noisy and sluggish
The Bottom Line: If you want Industrial printing, you get the noise with it too!
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| MichaelHatton's Full Review: Epson Stylus Photo 820 Inkjet Printer |
The Printer
Being stamped a photo printer these days, for an inkjet, is very significant. Considering a true photo printer costs in the region of half a grand for a decent one, the inkjet alternative that is Epson’s Stylus Photo 830, 820 in the US. Considering printers are usually judged upon by their raw factory stats like the DPI (Dot Per Inch) a rather crude way of measuring resolution, the key importance here is that the Photo Printer that can be bought for a measly 85 quid (slang for British pound) and produces a whopping 5760 dpi. Not nobody is going to prove this, in fact the measured quantity is based on the printers heads and how many lines they can produce per inch, unless its stamped a more realists DPI2 (dot per square inch). Those DPI2 values are more realistic but never used since the value is always much lower. From the likelihood of getting 5760 - which is overcoming the paper’s own strand sizes – you are comforted with a more realistic value of 1440 dpi. Still this value is remarkably keen for an inkjet, Laser printers struggling to do better than 1200. Scanners on the other hand are way more powerful, most coming in at 3600. But who cares about that, the real test comes down to the Glossy Paper and I was immediately struck by the development of printers since my last Lexmark 3200.
Not exactly far from Epson’s usual design the new silver and deep grey colours do indeed set the printers effective looks beyond the boring beige and toward the high end TFT flat panels or Laptops. But this 3.2 kg monster is not built for portability, the heavily clad plastic wraps around the well-machined mechanics. You don’t get naff flexible plastic trays that usually come to the ‘Stylus Color’ range; instead there is a new retractable front tray that folds up over the front of the machine – ingeniously covering the slots. The rest of the machine is heavily constructed and the paper support is one of the strongest I’ve seen. Oddly the machine comes with three buttons, one of which is usually traded for an automatic trip that senses the lid being opens – the ink change button. I don’t really like the operation of the machine either. The moment you plug it in or turn it on, it goes into an unstoppable warm-up/cleaning procedure that takes around a minute, made worse by the fact it’s noisy and clunky too. It is indeed far noiseier than the Lexmark 3200, and far slower to get going.
The printer came with a bundle of software, three CD-ROMs to be exact, which included a Harry Potter Photo Studio, Epson drivers/software disc, and Adobe PhotoDelux Home Edition. I don’t really miss the Female Voice from the Lexmark software, but the Epson programs seem very slow and take up a lot of resources. Printing does take a small amount of time for the printer to settle and warm up, but once it gets going, there is no stopping it. Printing speeds are amazingly quick, even on the decent settings it steps up a gear only slowing for colour or extra detail. Pages Per Minute varies but you can expect a full page document to take less than 10 seconds on the Text mode. From the printer preferences panel you can select a set of different printer qualities, these include; Draft, Text, Text & Image, Photo and Best Photo. Dubiously they don’t specify the DPI for each setting, you may well expect the 5760 quote to apply to the Best Photo mode.
But the features have not quite stopped. Literally there are a few other specialities that the printer comes with. The first is an all-new 5-section colour cartridge, which means two things – faster printing, and longer print cartridge lives. The colour cartridge as expected is much bigger than the black cart, in fact it’s 5 times as big believe it or not! It does mean that the huge cartridge is put to a huge carrousel, one that is much bigger than one I saw in an A3 printer. Even so the huge assembly has no problem whizzing by at speed. The colour cartridge is quoted to produce 220 pages of text with 5% to each colour, the black cartridge will print 540 pages.
The second feature worth a mention is the Borderless function. I haven’t tried it, but in the Printer Preferences is an Option for Borderless prints, that is equivalent to say that the ink will run to the edge of the page. It does warn heavily that it could go wrong, say, if the page is slightly off or skew. Why this function is optional is odd to me.
The printer connects with a standard PC AC three-pin power cable. It is compatible with Parallel or USB connections. Each ink cartridge is fitted with a Memory chip to store data on its use; it also shows you the manufacturer of the cartridge from within the Printer preferences.
It is recommended that you clean the printer heads when switching cartridges; I found it produced lines when they were changed. You should also take time to align the cartridges as this changes from time to time.
The Results
Draft
In draft mode, the printer produces fairly low quality graphics and text – most being grey. It spreads the ink over each item so that it is like pointillism. The printer is capable of 14 pages per minute in this mode printing a full document of text. This mode isn’t recommended other than for non-presentational work, when ink levels are low or with light paper.
Text
Generally this mode will suite if you are printing text only pages, not that it is in black and white, but it produces adequate quality. Most of the time the quality of text was rough and untouched, even on large fonts. Also the print is not quite as dark as it should, economy paper is recommended. The page per minute level is 8.
Text & Image
The resolution is probably the same as Text, but its tone is bolder and slightly less pixelated. This setting provides more vivid graphics where the reds greens and blues are more dimensional. Heavy paper or Matte is recommended here. It does 7 pages per minute.
Photo
I have used this mode without complain for full sized Digital Photos. This mode is for Glossy paper and only Glossy paper, if you use other paper, you are wasting ink. At this level, 1440 dpi the quality is exceptional, definitely Photo quality, and the detail is very good and deep. Here though page per minute drops to only a half, about two minutes for an 8by10 photo.
Best Photo
Not really recommended unless you by the best paper you can afford. This mode exploits the printer for its best output, and resolution, which goes unnoticeable unless the paper has a higher grade. I tried this mode and compared on the same 1700dpi paper with no noticeable differences. This mode would be fine if you are using it for small images or one-off pages since it takes just under ten minutes to complete.
One of the better things about the printer is the ink, and the ink is cheap too. I found a set of non-Epson branded cartridges sold for less than £5 each on the internet, whereas the Epson ones were £5 or so each. The ink lasts for ages, the included cartridges lasted 20-full size prints on Photo mode, and many others on that mode but in smaller sizes.
Conclusion
Respectively the printer is cheap to buy and cheap to run. I haven’t tried any other printer in the market, but I am sure this must be one of the best. Considering the results, which are as close to Photo-quality as you can get, this is truly a good buy. You really find that you need the best camera for the best results. In general a 3 mega pixel camera will be adequate for an A5 sheet, where a 6 mega pixel camera would do an A3. And considering a professional photo printer costs well over four times the price of the Stylus Color 830, it quite rightly makes it a hell of a buy.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): £85
Operating System: Windows
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Epinions.com ID:
MichaelHatton
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Location: Darlington, England
Reviews written: 192
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