List Price: $199.99
Sale Price: $166.99
Today's Bonus: 17% Off
Ok, I've been an epson user for over 15 years, owning more than 20 epson printers for my home and graphic design business. Epson has always tried, and in most cases succeeded, in offering the best print quality at each price range. The reliability, consumables cost and customer support of their products has ranged from just ok to horrible, depending on the product and which way the wind was blowing at Epson.
This little printer indeed produces stunning prints right out of the box. But your smile will dim a bit when you realize that each ink cartridge runs out about 3/4 of the way through the provided paper in each pack, and that separate cartridges cannot be purchased. Oh well, so it's really more like 40 cents a print, instead of the 25 cents advertised. You can live with that, right? But you let the printer sit a few days, maybe even a few weeks without printing anything. Then you try to print again and the photos come out looking a horrible, banded mess. So you run a test pattern and clean the print heads -usually between 2 and 5 times before a clean pattern prints out again. But you then find out each cleaning cycle drains the cartridge tremendously, so much that a brand new cartridge will only yield around 40 prints (which =$1.00 a print!!) if the cleaning cycle is used even 3 times, which seems to be absolutely necessary whenever the printer sites idle for more than a day.
In short, this printer seduces you with beauty, then steals your wallet. I have a stack of unused photo paper over a foot high, but I'm always out of ink! Of course, Epson could sell a cleaning cartridge for this, or sell the ink cartridges separately, or even expand the ink capacity, or even just advertise the real amount on images you'll get from each pack. But then they would miss out on all that glorious revenue, and they know you won't raise a big fuss over such a small initial investment (like the people who bought their much more expensive pro printers). You'll just stop using it and go back to sending out for prints. So I guess this negative review is for the people who have not bought one yet, and for the extremely remote chance that epson reads amazon reviews and then decides to do the right thing an offer solo replacement cartridges for us poor suckers who did buy one.
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