Pretty to look at, smart to use.

The beauty of these printers is not entirely based on their lovely design: The Epson 777i works for both MAC and PC and does an excellent photo quality print for very little money. You can usually find them for as little as $100, and if you are a graphic designer or do desktop publishing, it is an excellent printer for presentations to clients along with photographs. It does have it's drawbacks however:

1. It eats ink like there is no tomorrow and the ink jets have a tendency to clog. For important documents, it should always be set to 1 print first so that you can see the results before doing a large run.

2. When in need of a large number of printouts on anything other than regular ink jet paper, it is best to babysit the run as it does have a tendency to grab several sheets at times: especially when set to matte heavyweight paper or when using labels of any kind.

3. For any print or graphic programs that require color, always try to calibrate the monitor view to that of the printer, or the color that comes out will be less vibrant than what your monitor is telling you it is. Calibration is crucial with any color printer, anyway.

4. Since it eats ink, do not replace it with the first warning: wait until the printer refuses to print anything until it is changed. There is usually more left in the cartridge on the first warning. Also, the famous trick of shaking the cartridge to dislodge any loose ink will allow the printer to remove the "change ink" warning and will print out more documents, but will not warn you when the ink is actually out. So it really is best to change it when it is empty.

5. Since this is not a borderless printer, if you want the maximum size printing area on the paper, don't forget to set it to maximum print area. There is an error warning that will come up that says the quality may be poor in the extra area when using high quality photo paper: sometimes that will happen, but pretty rarely.

6. I go through these printers like crazy and literally wear them out = this is because I use them constantly and for large runs. If you tend to print this way, it will have a good solid life of 1-2 years before getting weird.

If you can handle these issues = then it is a wonderful purchase. Before this I had the epson 740i which lasted about 1 1/2 years, then this one for the past year [granted the performance might have been hampered by the fact that it was covered in asbestos dust in a building one block from the trade towers - but it cleaned up like a dream and still worked after all that!]. I just got the new epson borderless printer but still plan on using the 777i til it dies. I have a feeling this one might just outlive the 740i by a reasonably long time!

NOTE= in response to the comment on this review concerning the print speed: I have no recollection as to what the advertised speeds were per page in text or for full color photo: I'm sure that an ad for the printer will explain that more clearly. I have found that the regular printing speed for text is fast enough that I never noticed it: for graphics = there is a huge difference between the speed of regular color to photo enhanced. However it is the grade of paper that is entered into the printer settings that seems to affect the speed of the page the most. With a little toying in the advanced printer mode, you can get it to give you photo quality images at a faster speed than advertised.

The speed seems to be more defined by the user than by the printer.