A very good buy for small office or home use.

I have had about 4 or 5 color printers over the last 10 years or so, and for some reason they were all Hewlett Packard. When I recently acquired a digital camera and tried to print out some photos on my HP 600C, it became obvious immediately that this was not the printer for this type of work.

So, my search began for something affordable that also wouldn't cost an arm and a leg for each ink cartridge. I have become increasingly aware of the cost of ink for computer printers. This is especially true for color output. I also have been reading a lot lately about the fading of color inks when used for photos. I have seen several articles that said that most photos printed with current inks will fade significantly within 1 year.

Since I had such a long history with HP printers, I checked out all of their models and had almost decided on the HP 940. It sells for $149 and was supposed to be faster than the HP 932C that I use for my home office. That sounded great because I am very pleased with the results from that machine.

Then I read two recent articles, one in PC World and the other in PC Magazine. Both of these were reviewing and rating the newest ink jet printers. Both of these editors chose the Epson C80 as their "Best Buy". After reading these articles, I started to seriously look at this printer. I also saw something about the Epson color inks that made the decision simpler. The Epson ink is supposedly pigment based as opposed to dye based like all the others. This is supposed to increase the archival qualities to around 70 years when used with their photo paper.

This particular model also has a current $30 rebate, so that brought the price down to the same level as the HP 940. With all this in mind, I ordered one from OfficeDepot.com. It arrived 2 days later (which was 2 days earlier than they had promised!!!). The setup of the machine was extremely easy, no foul ups at all with the software. The ink comes in 4 cartridges, one black and one for each of the primary colors. This is a great advantage since you may be able to save a few pennies by only replacing the color that runs out. The cartridges install very easily, but when the machine is first set up, the cartridges have to "charge". This is a somewhat noisy process but painless. The paper feed is upright, and is very easy to use. The output tray folds down from the front and is also very simple.

Using the printer takes some learning to get the best output. Luckily, a good manual (actually printed on real paper instead of online) comes with the printer and explains everything. Once you get the basics down, it is very easy to use. Unfortunately, no one seems to have been able to figure out how to have the machines sense the type of paper you are using so you have to tell it each time if you are using anything other than the default of "plain paper".

Once you get past the setup for the page you are printing, everything is simple. One really cool feature is that the on screen window shows you the estimated ink levels in each cartridge as the page is printing. The speed of plain text printing is incredible. Epson says that you can get as much as 20 pages per minute with plain text. I believe this is only achievable when using the lowest resolution, but it is incredibly fast. The black and white text print is as good as any I have seen from any ink jet and, to my eye, rivals laser printing. Printing color is a lot slower, but still lightspeed compared to the printer I replaced. I created a PowerPoint slide with 9 jpeg photos on it and printed it at the best resolution. This page took about 3 minutes to print once it started. The quality, however, was equivalent to anything I have gotten from a photo lab. I am extremely impressed! About the only complaint I have is that the loading of a piece of paper is a little noisy. The actual printing, however, is as quiet as a whisper.

I have only had this machine for about a week, but based on what I have seen so far, I would highly recommend this model to anyone looking for an affordable unit suitable for home use or a small or home office.