Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I've had Epson printers for about 10 years. They can provide years of brilliant photo quality prints, but can also be painfully frustrating. Time will tell how this new printer fits on that continuum. This thing is huge. It takes up almost twice as much real estate as my Brother 2270 laser. The duplexer hanging off the back adds about 4 inches to the depth. It has lots of surprising bells and whistles. Whether you need all that is up to you. More on that later. The wireless setup was the best I've seen. Turn it on, it detects the network. Enter your SSID right on the panel, and your done. After that, setup on both XP and W7 machines went without a hitch. The color printing by Epson is excellent. It makes Dye Sub printers just about obsolete. These'Claria' inks are dye based, but are supposed to have great UV resistance. I'll leave a photo in the Sun and let you know in 20 years. Initial tests on photo printing are astounding. I use Kirkland Glossy Photo paper, best photo print mode, high-speed turned off. I compared it with a print (same photo) from Winkflash on Fuji paper. It was as sharp, or sharper. The blacks are blacker with more pop. It could use a little more saturation in the yellow and magenta. But without any tweaking, the profile is pretty much dead on. I haven't said anything bad yet. What's not to like? The only negative specific to this printer so far is the paper tray. It seems flimsy and complex. There appears to be no way to manually feed paper, so card stock probably won't work. Also, if you want to run a couple of sheets of full size photo paper, you have to replace all the paper. Or, put in 1 more sheet than you need on top of your regular stock. Otherwise it will snag on the last one and double feed, with disastrous results. My general beef with Epson is their notorious ink costs. Epson has spent a lot of time and money in courts trying to make sure you can only buy their ink cartridges, with limited success. Instead of selling at competitive prices, they would rather sue. To me that's like Ford saying you can only buy Ford gasoline. If you do a lot of printing, you can spend a lot on ink. However, I've found inksupply.com to be a great source to ease that pain. If you don't use the colors regularly, the head can clog. They don't make cleaning the print head easy for you. They could make it pop out for easy cleaning and replacement, if they wanted to. A basic head cleaning cycle wastes a lot of ink and doesn't always work. That's when you start looking for the 2 lb sledge. I'm hoping these dye based inks are less likely to clog due to their smaller particle size. Now for all those features. They really designed this printer as 'family-friendly'. They don't seem to be marketing it that way, though. Duplex: Pretty handy if you do a lot of plain text printing. It is cool the way it prints the top side, then slurps the page back in to do the other side. Scanner: The scanner is very accurate, and I've always liked the EpsonScan software. It's powerful, yet simple. You can mess with the settings, or just pop it in and do a quick scan to your desktop. Copier: Really impressive copies. I couldn't distinguish between a print and a copy of the print. Try copying something with colored tape or similar on the original. You'll think you can peel the tape off the copy! SD card slot: Print without the computer. I would never want to do that, but you can. Print from your smart phone: There's an app for that. Reviews on the Android app are mixed so far. I haven't tried it yet, but it will useful, I'm sure. Now for the family stuff: CD printing: That could come in handy if your distributing wedding photos or something. You can also print a jewel case for your bootleg REM CD. Coloring Book: Strange thing to build into a printer, instead of the software. You can only do it from an SD card or the scanner. But it will be fun for the kiddies. Lines and Graphs: Make your own notebook paper and graph paper. Why no built in 3 hole punch? Greeting card: Again, it seems this would be a software feature, but it's firmware on the printer. I'm sure there's more features too numerous to tell. I can't give it 5 stars yet until we see how it fares over time. But the engineering and design seem solid (if a little weird as noted). This printer does a lot, and it does it extremely well. I will post some photos, and if I can find a way to make this review even longer, I will at a later date. Edit 10/22/11: I've done a couple more full size photo prints. I'm almost out of 2 colors. But ohhh the sweet reproduction of color. I did a collage of some old photos using the copier function. One photo has a red ink mark. Another has a pushpin hole. For a second I thought the copy had a hole in it! The red ink mark looks like someone just swiped a pen across it. Also, I did borderless 8.5 x 11 and there was no smearing at the edges. Amazing reproduction. I was also pleased at the speed increase over the old EpsonScan software. Everything worked flawlessly. Gotta go buy some ink... EDIT 4/10/12: Apparently Epson did a firmware update that totally prevents you from using 3rd party ink cartridges. The error message says: "Cartridge not Recognized". It's hard to imagine that that's legal. It's also just rude. So although Epson says they recommend using only their own ink, what they really mean is the printer will only work with their own ink now. I'll be looking for a Canon before Epson gets any more of my money. I can't believe their arrogance.