Epson Printers
The Epson Stylus Colour 880 printer, has given me trouble-free printing
since I bought it back in 2000 when it first came out. Previously I had owned the Espon 740 model
that was similar in design, but tended to be somewhat noisy. So in my opinion,
Epson tend to make a robust machine that will last years, so I have no doubt
whatsoever, that my next printer will be an Epson..
The set up of my printer was fairly straightforward, I was running
Windows Me operating system at the time. I just put in the CD and it loaded the
driver no problem. Like the 740, it has a monitor window the pops up when you
print showing you what is ink remains in the cartridges. There are two of
these, black and colour, the latter of which is of the three colour variety -
cyan, yellow and magenta. If like me, you don't mind messing about with inks,
they are easy to fill with refill kits that can be bought for a pittance on
line. The original manufacturer’s Epson cartridges tend to be fairly expensive,
but this model is un-chipped and that means you can buy cloned cartridges on
line for less than half the manufacturer's price on some websites.
My machine connects to the computer by both the USB and parallel ports.
I opted for the USB. I had a little trouble with this at first because the
software kept defaulting to the parallel drive. I fixed this by uninstalling
the driver again, connecting the printer to the USB port and then re-installing
- it then defaulted to the USB port. A
bonus disk comes with the printer of high quality images, but I have not
bothered to load these, so cannot comment on them.
For a home printer that is designed for both text and photo printing,
the 880 produces surprisingly outstanding quality when printing photographs. To
the eye of a photographer, they may not be absolutely flawless, but I am quite
happy to print out photographs for our family album and my friends don't seem
to notice they have been printed on an inkjet either. I have even framed photographs up to A4 size, but I put them
through my laminator. All in all, I am more than satisfied with the photo
printing performance. I use Epson
Premium Gloss Photo paper that produces outstanding results.
For the technically minded, the 880 has a resolution of 2880 x 720 dpi.
and according to Epson prints 12 pages per minute in text mode, and 9 in colour
text, but it gets slower printing in photo mode, but I found it quite
acceptable as it runs quietly away in the background if you happen to be doing
something else on your computer. In
fact, it is the quietest inkjet printer I've owned, having had a Canon before
the Epson 740 both of which were quite noisy.
With text, the 880 is just as excellent and I have not once had to align
the print heads, like I was so often doing with the 740 because of crooked
lettering. Because I use ink refills, I do clean the jets often. Going into the start menu, control panel,
printers, easily does this. Right click on the Epson icon, and select
preferences. From there click on the utility tab, and select head cleaning.
Although the 880 was manufactured some time ago, I feel it still has
stylish looks and looks nice on my desk. It is robust and hard wearing, easy to
install and use and I would recommend it to anyone. I have upgraded to Windows XP since purchasing the 880 and the
printer continues to work happily away on this system too.
The price I paid was £130, give or take a few pence, but I believe the
price is well below that now and I have seen many going for a song on eBay.
Thanks for reading.
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