Pretty As A Picture!! (Epson Stylus D68 Photo Edition)

Name: newby2

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Product:	Epson Stylus D68 Photo Edition
Date:	29.05.07 (96 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: cheap and cheerful

Disadvantages: slow

Epson Stylus D68 Photo Edition Printer




I have had this particular printer for some time now and seeing as I have been overall fairly satisfied with it I thought I would share with you my thoughts and feelings about it.


So it must be over a year since I purchased this printer from my local Staples store. What caught my eye was the fact that it was on a special offer with over £30 off the recommended retail price and therefore I only ended up paying £40 for a £70 printer. This is the first thing that helped my decision to buy and the second was of course the fact that it was a photo edition and therefore capable of printing what I thought would be fairly decent photo’s. Of course you have to add into the price of the USB cable which is never supplied even though you are bound to have to buy one specially for it so luckily the guy in Staples reminded me of this fact when I was paying for the printer otherwise I would have been without one when I got home. Therefore add a further £15 on to the price of the printer to get the price of the total package to get yourself set up and ready for printing.


The printer itself did come with one set of ink cartridges and these would usually last me around a month and this is with not overly printing too many photos or documents. The cartridges in this printer are all separate colours where as usually you need to buy one block with all the colours in this printer has a separate red, blue, yellow and black cartridge that means if one runs out you don’t have to replace the whole lot at once and can get away with buying a cheaper single cartridge at a time. The single cartridge packet costs around £12 for the proper Epson ink but you can get the set for around £24 which of course works out a lot cheaper to buy the set and just keep the ones in reserve that haven’t run out for when they eventually do.


The main body of the printer looks fairly good with black and grey colourings and minimal buttons sitting on the top of the product giving it a simple yet sleek appearance. The paper tray can be taken off for storage or kept on to hold the paper neatly in place. You are able to tuck away the paper receiver tray when you are not printing and this keeps the whole thing looking nice and tidy by my desk. The three buttons which this product has are large and simple. They each have a light underneath which will flash when the selected button is pressed.


The first button is the power button and this needs to be kept pressed in for a few seconds for the printer to come to life and held in again for a few seconds for the printer to turn off. The green LED stays on while the printer is working. The second button once pressed will feed the paper into the printer ready for printing and this is especially helpful to make the whole printing process take less time. If this button is kept pressed in then the paper will feed all the way through and suck in the next sheet. The third and final button is for the ink change. The LED underneath the button will flash when the ink is running low and when you are ready to change the ink cartridges pressing this button will bring the cartridges into the correct position for removal and renewal of the said cartridge. This button is fairly important as without this it is near on impossible to change the cartridge if it is not in the correct position.


Of course before using the printer you will need to install the software that comes with the printer and the instillation CD that was supplied with the printer is very to load up onto the computer. You are guided through the whole process on your computer but if this is still too difficult for some to understand the instructions given inside the information leaflet are good enough to aid you all the way with pictures and text to tell you exactly what to do. Once the CD has been installed and the computer rebooted the printer is ready to do what it loves…printing.


The printer has a printing resolution of up to 5760 dpi which to be completely honest does not mean that much to me as I am not an overly techy person. I am not sure about how this compares t other printers on the market but I would probably say that there are a lot of printers that are better than this as the price is fairly cheap and I do think with things like this you get what you pay for. However all I know is how this printer works and that it does the job that I need it to do.


I print quite a fair few pictures off every month and the quality of the photos that I have printed through this machine is that of a fairly high quality. I of course do not think that they are anywhere as near as good as getting the photos printed from a proper photo printing shop but they look good enough sat in my photo album. The speed of the printing however leaves a little to be desired and it does take quite a while to print off each page of photos. This in itself is no big deal for me as I find I am in no particular hurry to get the photos out but can be a pain if I am wanting to leave the house as the printer is often left running till it has finished its job.


The noise of the printer is not overly bad compared to my last printer but it is still fairly loud and this means that to leave the printer on running when you want to go to bed is really a big no no but again for me this is no bother as that is not something I would usually plan to do. The size of the printer is fairly good and I think compared to others out on the market this Epson is quite compact although does still sit on a table of its own in my house.


So to conclude I would say overall I am fairly happy with the overall use and reliability of this printer. It was cheap to first buy even if the ink cartridges can be pretty pricey all in all the costs are kept fairly low. The speed is not great but perfect for my particular needs. I would say this printer is suited for the occasional use of printing both text documents and photos. The speed is not great so if this is something you are bothered about perhaps this is not the printer for you but otherwise this is a great printer to use in a family home as it is simple to use and cheap to run.

Summary: a good printer for occasional use

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