General Purpose Printer that offers more than you thought (Epson Stylus D88 Plus)

Member Name: opehelia

Product:	Epson Stylus D88 Plus
Date:	10/01/09 (118 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great prints in fast time, amazing software

Disadvantages: USB 1.1 not 2.0

I've been needing a decent printer for a while now, and this one was definitely in my price range.

Whilst this smart and compact ink-jet printer has very basic settings to toy with, it's a surprisingly good printer when it comes to quality and printing speed, and it even fits underneath my bed.

I did find (not that it made a big difference) that the USB connection was only 1.1 supported and not the modern 2.0.

As with most printers, i did find it ran out of ink sooner than i thought, but the quality of the prints and the speed that the ink is dried, without any smudging, i'm happy for the ink to disappear a little faster than estimated. (the warning light does tell you when ink is running low)
The four-colour ink cartridge is very easy to change/refill, but as with all inks these days, can be expensive to change (i found the individual colour cartridges to be available at £8 per refill of DURABrite Ultra Ink)

On-top of the very reliable printer, you get the excellent as ever Epson software with the printer which is very helpful and is highly praised as very user friendly, which is true to its word.
It provides a complete breakdown of the printers details with a troubleshoot from the hardware to the software.
The (optional) software in question is the "Creativity Suite" which consists of the Easy Photo Print, File Manager, Epson Web-To-Page Resizer, PIF Designer (Print Image Framer) and ArcSoft Photo Impression which will assist with all of your printing needs including scanning, editing, photo touch up's, email attaching and so forth..

The cost of this printer is worth buying for the software alone!
You'll also be happy to know that the software is MAC compatible.

I think this is more of a personal printer than a business printer as it only manages to hold 100 pages of paper at a time.
I also found that the attachable/detachable piece of plastic that holds the paper upright was a pain-in-the-ass to attach, so i have left it off, but the pages can be feed through off-center because of this.

For those interested, a few technical details i thought might she some further light:

Optimized dpi rate = 5,760 x 1,440

Printing speeds = optimum black text at 23ppm, colour text at 14ppm and 10 x 15cm (6 x 4-inch) photos averaging 92 seconds

Well, all that said and bearing in mind this is a smaller and less capable printer when compared to its bigger brothers, this printer is all very simple, very reliable and perfect for your kids homework.

Summary: Perfect for CV's, homework and even photo's

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