RELIABILITY OUTWEIGHS ITS STRENGTHS (Epson Stylus C82)

Member Name: mdstone

Product:	Epson Stylus C82
Date:	20/07/04 (710 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Quality printing, pigment-based DuraBrite Ink technology

Disadvantages: unreliable, printing is disabled when an ink cartridge runs low

Firstly, let me tell you that I work as a Desktop Support technician and as part of my job, I get called out to look at hardware/software problems with PCs, printers, scanners and other IT equipment on a daily basis. So I thought I would give a different perspective of this product and explain how this printer has performed in the office environment.

The look and features
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You could describe the look of this printer to be a bread-bin with a tongue sticking out of the top. The front of the printer has a pull-down lid which expands out into 3 sections used for holding printed pages. This can be closed when not in use to save space on your desk. The side of the printer also has an adjustable switch to change from printing out plain paper to letter.

There are a total of 3 buttons on the front of this printer which power on the printer, feed the paper into the printer and allow you to change an ink cartridge. The change ink cartridge feature can also be pressed to find out which ink has run low when the red button appears. The ink holder will then run across the printer and stop in front of an arrow, which points to the suspect empty cartridge, which is quite clever!

The printer has a 5,760 by 1,440 dpi (which stands for 'dots per inch', being a measure of the sharpness (that is, the density of illuminated points). This should please those who care more about output quality than the speed. The speed of a top quality print-out is quite poor but it performs acceptable with standard print-outs.

This printer claims to be the fastest four-colour desktop printer ever made and I can witness that this is in fact one of the fastest i've seen. It uses a new high-speed Micro Piezo print head which can deliver up to 22 ppm (pages per minute) in black and up to 11 ppm in color. I noticed that when printing in both black and colour, the pages only took a few seconds to dry. On printing a tes
t page for this printer, text and images were very clear, with pictures almost looking like a real-life photo. However, I have not tested this printer with photo quality paper so I can'not tell you whether the quality of this differs in any way.

A good feature of this printer is that is uses waterfast, pigment-based DuraBrite Ink technology. What does this mean?, well you could dunk a plain-paper printout in a bowl of water, and 2 hours later it would be virtually unchanged. The colours would not run at all!

The printer has the capability to be setup as either parallel or USB, so it is ideal for office or home use on any operating system.

The price of the printer is around £95, although you may find it for less if you shop around on the web. But the reason i'm writting this review is to persuade you not to shop around for this item as you can find far better on the market at a cheaper price, such as the HP Colour 1100d.

Hardware issues
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Thinking back to last week I can recall 3 of these printers having all the same hardware faults with them. One of these printers was not even 12 months old and the printer heads had gone.
Printer heads normally lie between the ink and the paper, so if these are not functioning as they should then a blank page will be printed even though you may have full ink left in all of the cartridges.
Don't quote me on this but the cost to replace/repair these printer heads are near to that of the full cost of the printer, so you may as well buy a new one.

Having seen 3 of these with the exact same problem, you can see that this is no coincidence. Breaking this to the customer is the hardest thing:

The customer: "My printer won't print".

Technician: "It looks as if the printer heads are knackered".

The customer: "So what does that mean?"

Technician: "Well thats the
reason its not printing, you may want to order a new printer as the cost of repair is beyond that of the printer".

The customer: "What??, but I've not even had this printer a year yet, it's practically new".

Technician: "It's the third one thats gone down this week with the same problem".

The customer: "I guess I have no choice but to order a new printer then, what do you recommend?"

Technician: "Try ordering one that has replaceable printer heads, like a HP 1100d, they will last longer too"

Ink Cartridges
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Another anoying problem with this printer is that as soon as an ink cartridge gets very low, the ink button on the printer goes red and all printing is disabled. You'd expect any normal printer to inform you that one of your ink cartridges are low but continue to be able to print, in case for example you wish to print in black and not colour. The only way to continue printing is to therefore buy a new cartridge to replace the one that has run out.
As Epson only recommend you buy their own repalcement ink and not 3rd party ink, this will set you back about £28 just for black ink and £12 each for Cyan, Magenta and Yellow. Thats over £60 worth of ink, which is very expensive. Of course you can buy compatible ink cartridges but these will not produce the same quality print outs and they could damage your printer and void the warantee.

Official ink for this printer are as follows:

Black - T032140
Cyan - T042240
Magenta - T042340
Yellow - T042440

What suprises me more is that this printer has previously won the 'Computer Buyer - Best Buy' award. I guess the printing quality and features are very good but I think they over-looked the reliability of the printer.

What's included with the printer?
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When you
open the box you should find an instruction manual, driver/software disk, power cable and parallel or USB cable to acompany the printer. I think in most cases, this product will be shipped with USB unless specified.

So in conclusion, this printer has some great features, but it's price, cost of ink and its durability let it down. I would therefore not recommend this printer to any potential buyer as there are far better printers on the market. I guess HP still lead the way in the printer market.

Summary: