Consumer Reviews

I’ve been a professional photographer (photojournalist and wildflower photographer) for more than 20 years, and was looking for a small format printer to just work up 4×6 prints of everyday life.

Having worked in a photo lab many years ago I can be quite picky about my photo processing. I am VERY impressed with the quality and speed of this printer.

I was printing instantly out of the box and directly off a memory card. Needless to say, I quickly ran through the sample ink and paper and was looking for more! Luckily I had ordered a full-size replacement when I ordered the printer. This is a fun and easy to use unit and I love the small size.

The quality of the prints is outstanding – bright and nicely saturated, although a couple could have used tweaking via Photoshop (but in these cases the exposure was a bit off) – certainly nothing to blame on the printer. I can’t wait to try a photo run through the computer and worked-up in Photoshop.

The bottom line – these prints are much better than anything I’ve gotten from a quickie lab. LOVE IT!

The photos printed on this paper look really great. They look just as good as something I would have done professionally for a standard 4×6. However, the amount of toner in these cartridges doesn’t appear to be anywhere near what they are promising. I got the printer for Christmas (it comes with a cartridge), along with this ink/paper replacement pack. I have printed exactly 102 photos, and have gone through both the starter ink cartridge that came with the printer, as well as the replacement ink cartridge. Now I am left with about fifty pieces of paper and no way to print on them. I am not printing anything unusual (just a bunch of photos of our kids), nor were the photos taken at a very high resolution (5M – not sure if that matters).

So, that would make the cost of printing each photo about $0.38-.40/each, and that doesn’t include the cost of the printer itself! I love the convenience of being able to easily print photos at home, but it comes at a high price when you can get it done online or at a local retailer’s for $0.12-.20/print. I guess that’s why they can afford to charge so little for the printer.

Quick follow-up as of 9/7/08:

I let the printer sit for a few months – just hadn’t had time to print anything lately. When I tried to print some photos yesterday, the color looked awful and there were banded lines on it. So I put in a new cartridge, but the photos still looked bad. The troubleshooting guide recommended cleaning the heads 2-3 times. I cleaned the head 8 times per the instructions, and it did look better, but still had the lines. The instructions say:

“If repeated cleanings don’t help, you can also turn the Epson Stylus off and wait at least six hours or overnight (this allows any dried ink to soften).”

I let the printer sit overnight, and did another head cleaning this morning. The quality still wasn’t back to normal, so I tried another head cleaning…at which point I got an error message that the ink level was low, and that you can’t clean the heads with low ink! Mind you, this was a brand new cartridge, and I hadn’t even printed any photos on it, just did several cleanings. Since I couldn’t clean the heads, I just started printing pictures. The first several came out with the lines, but after that they looked pretty good.

Anyway, I still like the photo quality and the convenience. But I probably blew through $10 worth of ink cleaning the heads. So, my advice to you is if you buy this printer, try to print to it fairly often so the print heads stay clean and not gunked up.