Digital Trends

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

Features and Design

The printer has a built-in 7.8-inch touch panel with a 3.5-inch LCD, both Wi-Fi and Fast Ethernet (10/100 megabits per second) network adapters (Bluetooth support is optional); an integrated media-card reader that supports SD/SDHC, xD-Picture Card, MemoryStick, CompactFlash, and MultiMediaCard; a PictBridge interface; a 48-bit color scanner with up to 4,800 dpi of optical resolution; a 33.6Kb/sec fax machine; a 30-page document feeder; color and black-and-white copier functionality; a CD-printing feature; and a double-decker paper tray that eliminates the need to switch between plain and photo paper.

The Artisan 800 supports both PCs and Macs, but you can print photos (and CDs) without even using your computer if you’re in a hurry. Simply plug your camera into the PictBridge interface or plug a memory card or USB device into the appropriate socket and the printer will display a preview of each photo on the 3.5-inch LCD. Leaving the display flush to the printer makes it easy to use while seated, but it will also tilt up so that it’s easy to use while standing. The printer’s “Fix Photo” feature will automatically adjust brightness, contrast, and saturation and includes face-recognition technology to optimize skin tones in photos of people. You can also manually perform other sorts of rudimentary photo editing here, including red-eye correction and cropping, using the touch screen and previewing your photo on the LCD before committing it to print.

The Artisan 800 has curvaceous lines and an attractive matte and gloss black finish, but its ability to handle legal size paper contributes to a large footprint of 18.4 inches wide by 15.2 inches deep. And despite its 23.8 pound heft, certain aspects—such as the sliding guides in the paper tray—feel flimsy. Epson’s designers did a good job, however, of shielding important features such as the document feeder and the paper tray to prevent dust from accumulating or being dragged onto the scanner glass and into the paper carriage.

Epson touts the fact that its double-decker paper tray allows you to keep both photo and plain paper in the printer at the same time, but they neglect to mention that you’re limited to either 4x6 or 5x7 photo paper in the upper tray, and larger sheets of either plain or photo paper in the bottom tray. This is great if you typically print photos only in the smaller formats, but we found ourselves changing paper just as much as we have with other photo printers.

Printing With and Without a Computer

As handy as it sounds to be able to print right from a camera or a memory card, we can’t imagine anyone being in such a rush that they wouldn’t want to spend a least a few minutes using a computer and a full-size display to perfect a photo before printing. And when we cropped a photo using the printer’s small display, the colors in the 4x6 print that the device produced looked great, but the print didn’t exactly match the image on the screen: The top of one of our subjects’ heads was trimmed just a wee bit more than the display had indicated.

The Artisan 800 is plenty fast, but Epson’s claim that it’s capable of printing an 8x10-inch photo in 50 seconds is way over the top—assuming you want a high-quality image. In our tests, printing even a 4x6-inch photo in the printer’s best quality mode required one minute and 24 seconds; printing an 8x10 consumed two minutes and 48 seconds. Still, that’s considerably faster than the Epson Stylus Photo R260 that we used for comparison. That printer took almost as long to print a 4x6—two minutes and 12 seconds—as the Artisan 800 needed to print an 8x10.