| Product: |
Epson Stylus Photo 830U |
| Date: |
15/07/03 (2058 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: excellent photos, you'd have to pay double to improve on the photos, good software and printer options
Disadvantages: noisy, relatively slow, not so good for text printing
After having got fed up with my last budget printer and trashing it, I was looking for a reasonable mid-price printer to handle printing photos plus occasional use for letters, documents and colour prints of web pages. After a trawl round the internet and getting people's advice I decided to go for an Epson, mainly because of their reputation for photo printing and not wanting the expensive cartridge costs for HP and Lexmark printers. Most of my colour printing is for A4 enlargements of holiday and scuba diving photos onto photo paper.
The Epson Stylus Photo 830U is a recent update and replacement for the 830, costs around £90 so there are many printers competing with it: the Epson C62 and C72, the older Stylus Photo 810, the Canon i550 and S330 and HP 5550. Although these printers have a lot of advantages I was looking at mainly photo printing so decided to go for the ESP 830. However for a cheaper printer I would certainly recommend the Canon S330 as an all-rounder, or the i550 if you are more interested in mainly text printing at higher speed without the need for photos or good quality images.
The printer is large - about 45cm wide - so needed a large desktop space for it go in. It has two USBs and serial port connection. For convenience (smaller plugs and wires) and better transfer rate USB is the preferred option now. Setup is very easy and there are even step-by-step diagrams that appear on the screen to guide you through the setting up and loading the cartridges into the printer for the first time. The second USB port is available to directly interface to an Epson digital camera.
You also get the Epson PhotoQuicker software which enables you to view directories of photos as thumbnails and easily scroll up and down them (similar to Ulead Photo Explorer). This is nicely set out on the screen and lets you flip through photos much quicker and see information about them better than Windows XP's thumbnail view mode or Photo E
xplorer. As a photo is highlighted information about it appears on the right hand pane. Zooming in enlarges to show the single photo instead of the thumbnails view and also options to set Print Image Matching or PhotoEnhance or other simple colour correction changes (vivid and clear photos, alter brightness etc). There are also options you can change the thumbnail sizes to show more or less of them at once. This software basically puts XPs thumbnails mode for My Pictures to shame and makes it very easy to flip through large collections of photos.
I am using the printer on both Windows XP and Windows SE and the printer has had no problems installing or using in both operating systems.
Features:
The ESP830U is a 6-colour A4 photo printer offering up to 5760x720 dpi optimised resolution printing and the ability to do borderless printing (i.e. it can print right up to the edge of an A4 sheet and not leave the standard 1 inch margin around it). It takes 2 cartridges: a black and a 5-colour cartridge (T026 and T027).
The printer software has the standard print options of text, text and image, photo and best photo and selecting the type of paper you are printing on to. It also contains PhotoEnhance as an option to use for scanned and digital photos to enable you to make colour corrections and automatically makes adjustments to pictures to improve sharpness and contrast. The PhotoEnhance software when selected makes some alterations to the colour profile to improve clarify and sharpness as it prints.
Using PhotoEnhance does slow down the prints but I found it does make a slight improvement to the clarity of colour prints.
There is also Epson Print Image Matching which enables matching colour profiles of a digital camera to match the printer colours, if your camera has PIM or EXIF. Also the printer supports ICM colour profiles so that you can set up Windows to display colours to match more accurately how they will print out on the printer. <
br>There are also standard maintenance options to make the print check or clean the nozzles, perform a printer head alignment etc although it runs through these when the printer is turned on. Using these maintenance options sucessfully removed some 'wheel marks' that the printer was beginning to produce.
So how is the print quality?
Printers constantly get better and better and the standard of the photos now available from the ESP830U are nearly photo print quality. Photo printing is where this printer excels. Printing scuba diving photos scanned in at 300 dpi the seas are a very clear blue, reds and yellows are bright and the contrast is excellent (although not as good as a standard 35mm colour print) and it is hard to see the pixels. Printing at a higher resolution picture (600dpi) improves this slightly. The photos are better than the Canon S330. Photo printing onto CD inlays and smaller photo paper produces extremely good quality prints and you have to look at them very closely to be able to see the pixels. For these smaller prints the contrast and detail is so sharp it is difficult to tell the difference between it and commercial CD covers and pictures in magazines.
For pictures enlarged to A4 the results are still impressive with very vivid colours although there is a slight drop in contrast (possibly due to enlarging from a 6x4 photo scanned in, albeit at a high resolution).
Text quality is also good, although certainly not at Laser-jet quality or the quality of HP printers, where the text is sharp and a strong deep black. Even an old HP Deskjet 310 in my opinion printed sharper blacker text. However compared to my last printer (Canon BJC1000) the improvement is many times better.
Speed and noise:
The Epson SP830U is not going to win many awards here as it is a noisy beast and fairly slow to print. But if you want to print good photos you are not going to worry about that are you?
A full colour bor
derless print with PhotoEnhance enabled can take up to 10 minutes to print although most of the A4 prints I have produced with the borderless print facility took about 3-4 minutes. However if you are printing reams of web pages you will notice the lack of speed, especially if they are in colour.
It is rated as 14 ppm for black and white and 13 ppm for colour, however in practice you are unlikely to achieve these speeds and I found web page printing slower than this.
Cartridges:
The ESP 830U uses a T026 Black Ink and T027 5-colour ink cartridge. These retail on the high street at about £20-25. However you can easily get compatible cartridges from computer fairs and the web for much less than half the price and use these instead. I have used these and not found any reduction in print quality. Original Epson cartridges are also available from web-based retailers for slightly less than the high street, but remember you have to account for delivery charges etc.
Unfortunately it does not have separate ink tanks for colour but also does not have the 'intelligent' cartridge loading facility the C72 and C62 have which have caused reportedly some headaches.
The printer monitor shows a level indicator for both the colour and black and white cartridge so that you can see how much ink is left.
The printer does tend to use up cartridges quickly - especially if you are printing full A4 colour prints onto standard A4 paper. Reviews on the web point the consumption out at nearly twice that of a Canon i850 but less than some HP printers and the C82 and C62. The other point is that there are not separate colour ink tanks so if you print mainly blue pictures and run out of blue ink first you have to replace the whole cartridge, not just a blue cartridge.
There is a draft / economy mode to improve use of ink although the quality is much lower on this mode.
Changing of cartridges is very easy. The software contains an Ink Cartridge U
tility that contains step-by-step instructions with diagrams and big arrows that appear on-screen
to guide you through the steps and even move the printer head into place so that you can easily get at it.
I haven't had any trouble with ink nozzles clogging on the printer.
Useful to know.........
In general, using proper photo paper makes a huge difference to the quality of the prints and makes them much better. Normal A4 paper will tend to soak up more colour ink and as a result the pictures are less sharp and get through cartridges quickly if printing large colour images onto them.
Also bear in mind that graphics and images are usually darker printed than they appear on screen.
If you are using a printer for the purpose of scanning your colour prints and printing them out at A4, it is well worth learning how to use your scanner software to alter the colour histograms and clip the RGB colour channels to suit each picture rather than just using the brightness and contrast settings to alter them. These will vastly improve the quality of your scanned images.
Image editing software is also very advanced and can be used to actually improve your photos by changing the colour balance, removing smudges, scratches or red-eye or sharpening them.
So overall?
The printer does what it says on the box ? photo printing is superb, especially for the price of the printer. It is also adequate at printing text and documents, web pages in colour onto A4 paper although if you are going to be doing more of this than photo printing it would be better to get a print better suited for text quality like a Canon or an all-rounder HP printer.
However the colour photo printing cannot be faulted for the price. Add the option for borderless printing which you cannot get on more expensive printers like the HP5550 and you have a great photo printer.
Summary:
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