10 out of 10 people found this review helpful.
Wow!
Date of Review: Nov 22, 2006
The Bottom Line: I wanted the printer faster so I paid more in shipping. This thing is the coolest printer I have seen so far.
My wife and I bought this mainly to print on DVDs/CDs, but we have discovered that this can do so much more! This is really an impressive product. Here is what we have tried so far.
1. Printing on DVDs/CDs--outstanding quality and the ink dries quickly.
2. Scanning--better than our HP 1315v (which we like) and a lot quieter.
3. Copying--only done black and white so far but it was crisp.
Things we look forward to trying: making our own family photos without having to pay high prices at a portrait studio (any size we want too); printing pics off of a PDA or cell phone; printing our own greeting cards by selecting what we want with a pencil or pen and then scanning our selections; printing photos on our choice of paper by marking our selections with a pencil and scanning the results and doing this all PC-free!
We haven't found anything we dislike about this product but we have noticed a couple of things. First, your text/copies/pictures will look good depending on your quality of paper. We noticed that on cheap letter paper heavy amounts of ink will make the paper a little wet. It's no big deal if it is something unimportant. Second, we didn't like all of Epson's backgrounds for the DVDs/CDs. We liked the ones from Memorex's Expressit Label Design Studio a little better. So after some tinkering, my wife was able to convert Memorex's backgrounds (using Corel Photo Album 6) into jpgs and put them into Epson's folder of backgrounds. So that has worked great.
We really thought the small ink cartridges would be a problem but after printing about 5 CDs and some other small graphics the ink levels haven't even moved. A coworker has an RX550 and has cautioned to remove the ink cartridges from the printer if you are going to be gone on a long trip (say more than a week). He was gone over a month and says the lack of use caused the ink to dry out. He had to get new cartridges and run the maintenance cycle 6 or 7 times to get back on track. We will probably take the cartridges out and seal them up when we go on long trips.
Overall this is a GREAT product! We are impressed and look forward to using it a lot!
November 11, 2006 UPDATE: Since we wrote this same review on Circuit City's and Amazon's websites, we still think this is a GREAT printer. The images printed on DVDs/CDs are excellent! We have noticed that it uses ink a little faster than non-photo printers but the color(s) that get used depend on the color of your images. That makes sense to us. We didn't have any major problems with software installation. The only snag is that it wants to restart your computer before it is finished setting everything up. We were able to make choices and finish the setup (including the calibration page) by clicking on our choices in the background. After we were done, we clicked on the Windows message box in the foreground to restart the computer. It's really no big deal.
Three more things. First, we still haven't tried out all of the features. Second, when the printer first sucks in the paper it is a little noisy. It startles you, but you don't need ear plugs. We quickly got used to it though. We can stand a little noise for great print quality. Third, after scouring the internet it looks like Newegg has the best deal on ink cartridges for this printer. We didn't see any high capacity ink cartridges on their site but we figure that this will change eventually. Also, we figure that prices will come down a little once the regular capacity and high capacity cartridges become available at more businesses.
