I come to eat your essays! Rargh! (Epson Stylus Colour 680)

Member Name: sugarlily83

Product:	Epson Stylus Colour 680
Date:	06/06/02 (243 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: prints quickly

Disadvantages: eats printouts, pricey ink

I initially ordered an Epson stylus color 4-something. Imagine my glee when, upon delivery, I tore open the boxes to discover that they had upgraded my printer to the 680 "at no extra cost" to me! WHOOPEEE!

Apparently it printed faster. Great.

Well the printer comes with a multi language manual. Fortunately it's the good kind, where all the English section is together, rather than spaced out. In addition to this, it comes with a clearly diagramed quick start up guide, which was very useful for me.

The printout tray doubles up as a dust cover, and just three buttons control the lot, making it easy to use.

But, there are problems in paradise. The printer just loves to eat my coursework! Oh yes, it'll print it out nicely enough, but then RARGH RARGH MUNCH MUNCH MUNCH NUM NUM NUM! the beautiful essay is sucked backwards to its death, and there's nothing you can do about it. Pulling only makes it angrier and seemingly hungrier, so all I can do is sit back and weep as my brave little page is scrunched, pierced, and horrifically over-inked.

Recently, the print quality has become poorer, but after cleaning the heads I managed to sort that out easily enough, though the alignment exercise my computer made me do to rectify the wonky writing was very hard to accurately do, especially if you're hypermetropic like me. (Ten points to anyone who didn't reach for the dictionary there ;-))

Now, we may think the good people at printer land are being very generous when they supply the printer with ink already in it-- but these cartridges are only ever around a quarter full. So before you know it, it's run out.

Epson tells us we should only use proper Epson ink refills, but we all know that they cost a lot of money. In fact, Epson cartridges are specially chipped so you can't refill them. (Well, you can, if you know how!) The man in the shop actually advised me to get an alternati
ve brand. But where from? All alternative ink refills in the shops seem to cater for everything bar this model. Angrily, I noticed that the printer I had originally ordered has available a wide selection of cheaper alternative inks. If they hadn't upgraded me I would have cheaper ink! Personally I'd rather have slower but cheaper prints than faster more expensive ones!

Only after a month of trauling through the internet did I eventually find a company who made what I was looking for.

So now I'm happy again. And one final good point: prints on photo paper are beautiful.

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