Epson Stylus Photo 780
Written: May 06 '02
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Pros: Fantastic Quality Prints
Cons: Noisy, slow, only works well on Epson paper, sucks ink like no tomorrow.
The Bottom Line: I would avoid the printer, for its many frustrations - high consumables cost and clogging heads especially.
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| TrekBody's Full Review: Epson Stylus Photo 780 InkJet Printer |
I'm what you would call a Macintosh Power User. I use my computer all the time, and one of my hobbies is digital photography. For this purpose, I have upgraded from an Epson 600 to the Epson 780. My intent was to stick with the great quality color prints, and add the Pigment-based inks that produce prints that should last longer than traditional inkjet prints. If it was as simple as that, I would be very happy with the 780, but this printer is not that simple.
The problems begin with consumables. PAPER - I have not had any luck printing on anything but EPSON paper. Other papers actually come out smeared, with liquid droplets beading on the paper, no matter what settings I use. I have tried every setting, resolution, so if you think you are going to get away with buying bulk, discount paper, you are mistaken (like Office Max paper or Sams Club paper). This is a serious shortfall in my opinion, as I do not always need to produce the expensive "Epson" prints for every job I produce.
INK - I have spent so much ink on this printer, that I am thinking of switching to another printer. It sucks it down like Gatorade. The 3-color combined cartridge is wasteful too, as there is always some color you are throwing away. Every time the printer starts up from sleep or power-off, it goes through its cleaning cycle, and in the process, dumps a couple of pages worth of ink. This becomes even more trying when you start needing to do head-cleanings, which brings me to the next problem - CLOGS.
CLOGS - The heads on this device are continually clogged. I have to clean the heads before every print, sometimes multiple times, and I just throw ink away every time.
INK - I have had two occasions where I inserted a new ink cartridge, and the printer has mistakenly thought they were the old ones, and "marked" them as empty. One marked (electronically), the cartridge cannot be used. It would be smarter if they just read how much was in the cartridge, but then you might refill it, or something similar to deprive them of all their ink revenue. An annoying "error" message also pops up every time you try to print with a non-Epson ink supply.
SOFTWARE - While working fairly well in Mac OS 9, EPSON really did a slow, poor job on OS X, which was out for some months after this printer was bought. Edge-to-edge printing is a function that was lost and has still not been brought back, and I have random errors and bugs, like not being able to do more than one head cleaning without rebooting the printer.
COLOR - the colors produceable by the printer are fantastic, BUT, I have rarely gotten a color-accurate print, even though I have tweaked ColorSync, Photoshop, and the printer settings every way I can imagine (at a great waste of paper and ink). If the colors are accurate, the shading is off, if the shading is accurate, the colors are off. I do not think that the ICC profiles (Colorsync) for this printer are accurate.
All-in-all a good printer for its current ~$100 price, but often frustrating, and expensive.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 140
Operating System: Macintosh
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Epinions.com ID:
TrekBody
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Location: St. Paul, MN
Reviews written: 7
Trusted by: 0 members
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