UPDATE 2006: Printer punked out on me after 1 year of use. The ink cartridges clogged the "ink spitters" and it was irreparable. Symptoms began when the cyan ink would no longer come out. I wasted money buying cartridges because the Epson support suggested that would fix the problem. After a Google search on the topic, I realized that I was not alone. I do not recommend this printer to anyone wanting to use their printer long term, and anyone who wants their paper to come out within 5 minutes of pressing print, and who would like to not wake up neighbors with all the clanking and carrying on the thing has to do before it finally prints a page!

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If you're like me, you take digital photos and you want a printer that does justice to the quality pictures you take of your annual tulip garden. You want a decent, stable printer that you can send a clear, crisp picture of the new family dog to Aunt Gertrude in Phoenix. You're not a professional photographer, but you don't want to compromise quality for the sake of affordability.

Let me introduce you to the Epson Stylus C82 Color Ink Jet Printer. Purchased at Best Buy for $129.99, this fantastic printer puts out quality photos on regular or photo paper at resolutions other printer companies will charge you upwards of $200 for. Not only does the C82 allow you to reach a maximum of 5760 x 1440 optimized dpi, but it also allows you to manage your printer to print on certain types of paper. This allows the "droplets" to be sized differently to make their best appearance on photo quality or other types of paper.

Keeping in mind that your dpi (image quality) is only going to be as good as your digital camera or scanner will allow it to be, I have found the C82 to produce clear, crisp, sharp images of every subject from the family pets, scenic landscapes, or close-ups of nature. The quality of images is always best on photo paper, but this is one of those printers that you can get by printing a decent image out on regular copy paper.

In addition to sharp images, the C82 does a fantastic, professional quality job with text. In the past, I had always taken resumes into the office to avoid the horizontal separation of black ink on black text. This printer is able to print high quality text in any color, to the point where upon close examination; one would wonder whether you used a laser jet.

I bought this printer to share with a friend who is writing a textbook. One of the features that was top priority was printer speed. Frustrated with the 8PPM of her circa 1997 printer, I was confident the newer technology would save her time and patience. What I was amazed to find was such an affordable printer that bragged of its 22 Pages Per Minute (PPM) speed for black and white documents. (11 for color) Sure enough, the printer is a workhorse for longer documents.

That kind of speed does take its toll on two things. First of all, the printer is extremely loud, starting with the paper load. I find the paper load to be somewhat annoying because it reveals the printer's perfectionist attitude. It will scroll and rescroll the paper until it feels the paper is exactly horizontally aligned. This is a nice favor, but the printer really over does it...over and over. The paper load is also annoying because it is NOISY. First, the paper to paper scuff noise, then the paper feed roller, and the noisiest process, the side-to-side crash crash while the printer is moving across to apply the ink. The noise reveals the fact that the printer really moves too fast for its casing. Do I think this is a reason not to buy the C82? Only if you need to print while someone is sleeping or are hyper sensitive to noise. The price and quality far outweigh the noise/crash factor, even though it is a minor annoyance.

The one harsher critique I have of the C82 is the output tray. It is handy in that it folds back into the printer for more desk space, but unhandy because when the paper pile adds up, the pile will prevent paper from coming out properly and eventually they will "curl up" in each other and at some point be out of order. It’s a good plan to keep track of the output by keeping an eye on things, and removing a few papers at a time will ensure that your papers come out in order.

But back to the good news. Let’s talk about ink. Someone was really thinking when they decided to separate the ink cartridges. As we all know, black ink is always the first to go. If you have a single cartridge, as soon as the black is gone, the cartridge is useless. (Sort of like that one light in your Christmas tree strand.) But with the Epson C82, and others, they are moving toward separate cartridges for black, cyan, magenta, and yellow. Individual cartridges retail for around $12 each.

Another great feature of the ink is that it is water resistant. What I have found this to mean is that if you want to print on the back of your paper, you don't have to worry about that ink bleed-through as with other inks. If you dip your paper in the dishwater, well, that would be a gross overestimation of your ink's resistance.

Finally, before a person actually gets to use a printer there is a set-up process. Epson C82 includes an installation disk that does all the work for you simply by you accepting all defaults. Not only does the software allow for easy set-up, but has some useful features for determining what settings are best for the job at hand, and also gives you a graphical representation of your ink levels.

Aesthetically, the C82 is a little bulky. Its newish, black cover door is stylish, but is definitely a dust magnet. Although you control most of the settings via the software, the buttons for power, paper, and ink are very easy to use and understand. They basically blink at you when they want to be pushed.

Although Epson C82 is a noisy dickens, I feel that the quality printing at an affordable price is worth the short term sacrifice of peace and quiet. Epson prints images that are true to color with superior resolution. If you buy one, you'll make Aunt Gertrude proud.


Recommended: No

Amount Paid (US$): 129.99
Operating System: Windows