Want a great all-around printer? Then read this!

I bought my Epson C80 as a result of a search for a good all-around color printer. To me, the term "good all-around printer" means one that delivers (1) excellent quality for photos, text / graphics, and mixed documents, on special and plain paper; (2) good printing speed; (3) good value taking into account upfront and running costs.

Well, I've had my Epson C80 for over a year and must say I was never disappointed. It has worked reliably, never clogged or jammed, never had its driver crash or freeze. It has proven to be a workhorse of a printer (no wonder Epson makes versions of it available with Ethernet and even WiFi wireless networking capability, a rare thing for inkjets - I actually use mine with a D-link 713P wireless router & print server).

Unlike its photo printer cousins in Epson's lineup with 6 or even 7 inks, C80 has only 5 (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black), each in its own cartridge (allowing inks that run out first to be replaced individually). Despite lacking the lighter additional inks of the photo printers, advanced variable droplet technology that C80 boasts, allows it to get excellent results printing photos nonetheless (even in highlights and delicate flesh tones), coming close to the imaging performance of contemporary photo printers, while keeping print head weight down without sacrificing ink capacity, allowing it to achieve great printing speeds especially on text documents.

This printer's inks are also pigment-based (as opposed to dye-based). While strides have been made recently in extending the stability and display life of dye inks that many other inkjets use, pigment inks as a rule are inherently more stable. It must be said that while some pigment inks have muted and / or muddy colors, C80's ink set is capable of producing quite vivid results.

I have only two concerns about the C80 inks: (1) I wish individual ink cartridges were a bit cheaper - $10 or so per individual color ink (3-color sets being available at a discount) somewhat eats into the magnitude of the benefit of individually replaceable inks, and (2) as far as I know, these inks and cartridges are only used on C80, perhaps making 3rd party software and media support and future ink availability matters of concern (although the great popularity and thus installed base of C80 should help).

Replacing inks is a snap (literally ;-), and so was installing the drivers and the printer itself. I've used C80 on a range of devices ranging from a 6 year old Windows 95 P5-100 PC with a printer port, to a Windows XP P4 via USB connection and even a D-link 713P wireless router & print server in conjunction with Fujitsu P series Transmeta notebook, for printing across a wireless home network, and it always delivered.

One other thing I was particularly impressed by as a matter of surprise, was how well this printer does printing relatively low resolution photos from Internet / email / low-res digital camera. Apparently the driver has advanced code for optimizing, anti-aliasing and up-sampling low resolution images while minimizing blur and visible compression artifacts, resulting in very nice printouts of web page graphics and other small images blown up to full page pints and such. I have not seen this capability on any other Epson printer before it, or any non-Epson printer. It essentially eliminated the need to up-sample using fractal or bi-cubic interpolation, that I had to do before in order to get better prints of small images.