Digital Trends

Epson Artisan 800 January 13th, 2009 | by Michael Brown

Print Quality

Prints are flat-out gorgeous, and Epson claims they will resist fading for 95 years (Epson bases its claim on accelerated testing of unframed prints conducted by Wilhelm Imaging Research. The prints aren’t cheap, however, considering that standard colored-ink cartridges are street-priced at $11 each, and high-capacity cartridges go for about $7 more. Black cartridges are priced even a little higher than color cartridges.

The Artisan 800’s printing prowess isn’t limited to photos, either; we used the bundled ArcSoft Print Creations software to produce several spectacular photo greeting cards using heavy matte paper. The print quality rivaled any store-bought card, and it boasted the added appeal of being custom made. We also printed labels on blank CDs using both TDK’s PrintOn media and Imation’s far-superior AquaGuard discs (ink smears right off a moistened TDK disc). The printer’s text print quality, however, was slightly inferior to that of the HP Officejet J5750 we used for comparison.

Using the Scanner and Copier

The scanner element of the Artisan 800 boasts an impressive set of features, including 48-bit color depth and optical resolution of up to 4,800 dpi, but it’s not equipped to scan film negatives or slides. You’ll need to be patient when scanning photos, but the results are worth it. At its highest resolution, the device took an average of 15 minutes to scan 4x6 photos; but the resulting files were very faithful to the originals and the scanner is capable of restoring faded photos even without the use of a PC. [Editor's Note: Most consumers will scan their photos using a lower resolution, e.g., 300 dpi, which yields significantly faster results.]

We were also impressed with the optical character recognition software that Epson bundled with the printer. ABBYY FineReader 6.0 Sprint not only did an excellent job of converting page scans into editable text, it also retained documents’ formatting and recognized standard fonts. The Artisan 800 makes quick work of copying documents, requiring just two minutes and 15 seconds to copy a 10-page document in color and one minute and 15 seconds to reproduce the same pages in black and white. The HP Officejet J5750 required six minutes and 10 seconds to make color copies and five minutes, 44 seconds for black and white. But you wouldn’t want to use either all-in-one device for regular copying duties, because the copies come out in the reverse order and must be re-collated by hand.

Conclusion

Epson’s Artisan 800 is loaded with features and it’s competitively priced. It’s a much better photo printer than it is an office machine, but if you really need to make dozens of copies, print reams of documents, and print high-quality photos on a daily basis, you should buy devices dedicated to each task.

We also want to comment on Epson’s claim of wireless connectivity, which the company describes as “wireless 802.11b/g, compatible with 802.11n.” We could not connect the device to our 802.11n access point until we configured the AP to operate in mixed 802.11g/n mode; the printer simply would not connect to a pure 802.11n network. That’s stretching the definition of “802.11n compatible” to the breaking point, in our book. Aside from that and the surprisingly lightweight plastic Epson deployed in a few key areas, such as the paper tray, we find few faults with this all-in-one.

Pros:
•    Exceptional photo prints up to 8x10 in size
•    USB and wired or wireless network connectivity
•    Attractive industrial design

Cons:
•    Replacement ink is expensive
•    Won’t connect to an 802.11n-only Wi-Fi network
•    Must purchase an upgrade to access some of the cooler features of the bundled ArcSoft Print Creations software