Epson's Newest Printer
Written: Dec 16 '01
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Pros: improvements over previous models, speed, quality, low level of noise
Cons: price, bulky design, memory hogging drivers
The Bottom Line: A great fast high quality printer that is a touch on the expensive side.
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| sk99's Full Review: Epson Stylus® C80 InkJet Printer |
The Epson Stylus C80 is Epson's newest printer for the home office/office market. It is one of epson's top of the line inkjet printers.
I have had 3 different Epson inkjet printers over the past few years, and my experiences with them have been quite bad. My last printer an Epson Stylus Color 600 broke down and it cost a fortune to repair so I decided to buy a new one. Fortunately Epson seem to have fixed many the problems that plagued earlier models.
The Epson C80 is fast, 20ppm at draft quality and yes I know no one really prints at that quality but hey it was in the specifications! But even at higher resolutions the Epson is speedy and well ahead of the competition. But does the quality suffer? Not at all, the prints from this printer are some of the best i have ever seen. The text printing could rival that of an entry level laser and the color just has to be seen to beleive it.
The Epson C80 is rated to go up to 2880 dpi when printing photos but beware this is only possible using Epson's special glossy paper. But even the lower 1440 dpi and 720 dpi should be enough for most uses. And if you really want your photos to stand out, invest in some epson photo quality ink jet paper, trust me you wont be disappointed! If you have a decent enough digital camera, it could mean the end of going to the photo labs.
Noise. Epson printers had a reputation of waking the whole household but not anymore. While using the Epson C80 I had to actually put my ear next to the printer to make sure it was working! This printer is dead quiet except when initally loading the paper.
Other Features
The Epson C80 is not only about speed, quality and noise. It has many other features as well. A new feature is the 4 different ink tanks for the 3 primary colors and black. This helps reduce costs as now you only need to change the cartridge that has run out of ink, rather than the whole color cartridge (like you had to before,) when only one primary color runs out. Infact in a recent PC Magazine article the Epson C80 was the cheapest to run over a three year period. Epson also now uses pigment based inks that dry quicker and last longer. In fact, Epson guarantees that these new inks will not smudge or run even after being dipped in water!! Also the size of each ink droplet is extremely small allowing faster and better quality prints.
The Epson C80 comes with USB and parallel connectivity.
If there is one downside to the printer it's in the drivers. While the drivers are effective and quite handy, they are too much of a memory hog and slow down the computer considerably even on a 1.3 Ghz AMD Athlon with 256MB Ram!
All in all the Epson C80 is a printer with great quality prints and incredible speed, as long as you are prepared to pay that little bit extra.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 217
Operating System: Windows
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Epinions.com ID:
sk99
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Reviews written: 9
Trusted by: 0 members
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