whir + clonk = amazing quality (Epson Stylus Color 680c)

Member Name: vladimpala

Product:	Epson Stylus Color 680c
Date:	19/09/01 (199 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: High Quality Output, Cheap, Parallel and USB interfaces

Disadvantages: No bundle, Noisy, High running costs

Having decided to replace my ageing Canon BJC-210 my attention was drawn to the Epson 680, it has received rave reviews and with the price having dropped to less than £70 it seemed like a bargain.

First impressions on getting it home were mixed, it comes with no cables (as usual), more annoyingly there is no paper pack to test out the 2880dpi it is capable of, nor is there any bundled software, though you can send off for 3 programs (from a list of about 15) which you only have to pay P&P for. Maybe looking for a paper pack and software is asking a bit too much when the price has dropped so far. The paper tray is laughably flimsy and time shall tell if it is up to the job, but it is better than letting the print drop to the floor (like my old printer did). They also claim the paper tray doubles up as a dust cover, which is a bit of a joke, true, it does fold up and attach to the front but it is hardly a dust cover. Otherwise construction quality seems to be acceptable, but not impressive.

Installation is clearly explained (in a multitude of languages) for both parallel and USB connection, but strangely they never actually tell you to plug in the power cable at any point. I had some problems at this stage as the installation program did not seem to recognise the printer was there, borrowing a friends cable showed my old parallel cable as the problem (even though it had been working fine with my old printer for 5 years). I eventually bought a USB cable and re-installed everything without any problems.

Print quality on plain inkjet paper is very good for plain text, however graphics and pictures do suffer from some banding. On higher quality paper, output of all types is amazing for such a cheap printer - text looks as good as a laser printer and photos look like, erm, photos. However these results nare the work of higher dpi settings and, as other reviews have mentioned, the higher dpi settings really drink the ink at an astonishing
rate.

If you want to save some ink (and paper) the driver allows you to print multiple document pages to one printer page. You can also adjust the quality/speed settings, choose from a range of pre-defined modes, or if you really want fine control you can tweak all the settings individually. In general I find the speed very satisfactory, especially for plain text.

If peace and quite are important to you, then you should probably look elsewhere, this machine is not a smooth operator. It makes an alarming array of mechanical whirls and clonks when first switched on, and during printing it doesn't get much better. Whether this crude nature will have any negative long terms affects on the printer itself only time will tell.

The printer comes equipped with smart ink cartridges (they have a built in computer chip) that tell the printer how much ink they have left and this information is displayed on screen during printing (along side a progress indicator), it will also tell you how many more pages like the last one it printed can be produced from the remaining ink. Following installation this software, rather surprisingly, told me that my black cartridge was practically empty despite only having printed about 4 pages of text. My cynical side would suggest that they deliberately put a near empty cartridge in with the printer to force you to buy another really quickly. A downside of these smart cartridges is that once they think the cartridge is empty the printer will stop until you replace it. And once a cartridge thinks it is empty you cannot just re-fill it to convince it otherwise - no doubt a ploy from Espon to force you to buy their replacement cartridges.

Replacement cartridges are not cheap, at £25 for black and £18 for colour, as mentioned above re-filling is not as easy as it is with most other cartridges, and 3rd party re-cycled cartridges are not as widely available. However, things are slowly changing and there a
re now some available on the web, though I haven't tried them myself (see bottom of review for web addresses). You can also buy a gadget that will re-program the cartridge chip allowing you to re-fill them as normal (again I haven't tried this). The physical changing of cartridges is really easy, and as both the colour and black cartridges are held in the printer at the same time you only need to change them when they run out.

For a home user this is a great printer, it produces quality output and it is cheap to buy. A small office or a higher volume home user will probably want something quieter with lower running costs.

Addresses for refill cartridges
http://www.inkjetcartridgesuk.com/index.html
http://www.inkjetuk.com/inkjets


P.S. you can also get a "Transparent" version which is mechanically identical but has a naff translucent and blue case.

Summary: