Epson Artisan 800 Printer: First Look

I just got a review unit in-house this week of the Epson Artisan 800 printer. (If you watch Rachel Ray, today her entire audience received one of these printers as part of her gift-a-day holiday giveaway!)

Although I haven't had time yet to give it a full work-over, I wanted to take a few minutes to give everyone a "first look" at what I've learned so far since it will be on a fabulous sale at Staples on Friday. (It normally retails for $299.99 but Staples will have it for $229.99. It's regularly $251.95 at Amazon's discounted prices so the Staples sale is a really good deal.) [Update: The Black Friday sale at Staples is over but now the Artisan 800 is on sale at OfficeMax for $229.99 from 11/30 until 12/6. All Epson photo paper is also on sale 50% off at OfficeMax and at Staples. ]

The Epson Artisan 800 is an all-in-one printer/scanner/fax/copier. It is Wi-Fi & PictBridge enabled and uses a "smart ink" system with six cartridges. The scanner is 4800dpi, a dual paper tray is adjustable to hold 4x6, 5x7 or sizes up to 8.5x14, borderless printing is available in multiple popular sizes, it has two sided printing...I could write a book just listing all of the 800's features. The 7.8" touch panel lets users access a wide variety of functions besides just basic printing without touching their computer: cd printing, color restoration, and other special features.

So is it as good as it sounds? I have to say that so far, yes, with one exception that is hard to hold against it because it's a problem that is pretty widespread in technology and printers.

First, the bad: the wi-fi set-up process was very difficult, to say the least. There are multiple methods provided by Epson to do it. It ended up that the one that was the most hassle for me - plugging the printer directly into the router to set it up - was the only way I could get it to work. This is not, however, something that I can hold against Epson or this particular printer since printer WiFi set-up is notoriously buggy in general. Once it was set up, it has worked flawlessly and connected to the other computers in the household with no problem.

Another part of installation that was annoying is that the installation process was loaded with bloatware (unnecessary software that is installed as part of the installation process). I wouldn't recommend against the whole printer because of it, but I would warn anyone installing this printer that you are probably going to have to uninstall things when you are done with Epson's installation process. The standard installation process leaves you with four new icons on your desktop - just from installing a new printer! This is because it also installs two pieces of software - ARC Soft Print Creations and ABBYY Fine Reader - that are optional and which most people will never use. Those two applications totaled 229MB of installed files on my Windows XP system. If you are short of hard drive space or a fanatic about keeping a clean hard drive, you will want to uninstall a bunch of that stuff, or do the minimal install to begin with.

When my computer geek husband attempted to install the printer on his Mac and told the installation tool to give him JUST the printer drivers, he ended up with 100MB of printer and network management tools installed on his computer as the "just the necessities" installation. Although some people may want the ability to monitor their ink levels from their computer, you don't need those programs to use the printer. Yet there seems to be no way to install the printer without them being loaded on your system. (This bloatware problem is not unique to Epson, although this is the worst case I've seen in some time I think.) He had to uninstall most of them afterwards so that just the print driver that he actually asked for was left.

One of the applications includes a pop-up window asking you to allow it to "phone home" via your network when your printer ink is low so that Epson can try to sell you more ink for your printer. I recommend disabling that by clicking "decline" for both privacy and security reasons. (Again, this is not a problem unique to Epson.)

OK, bloatware in the installation software aside...the hardware part of the Epson Artisan 800 is pretty impressive so far.

Because I had a project sitting right here waiting to be done, the first thing that I tried playing with was the "color restore" function in the copier. I had a picture of my grandparents that was taken well before I was born (at least). It had faded and developed a blue haze over time. My mother had asked me to work some Photoshop magic on it a few days ago. I figured I would give it a try on the Epson and see what it could do with its automatic color restoration as an experiment.

The results were absolutely amazing. I showed the picture to my mom this afternoon and she agreed that the picture looked very similar to how she remembered it before it faded. We actually ran the new copy through the copier again and got an even better result - with practically no visible image degradation on an 8x10 - by making a color-restored copy of the copy. And it only took about 2 minutes to do. My Photoshop Elements takes longer to boot up than that!

I've also tried to specifically compare a few things on the Epson that bug me about my current printer (an HP Deskjet 6980). The paper feeding is very finicky on my HP - if i want to feed anything other than standard 8.5x11 cheap printer paper I have to take out all the paper or it will fail. I tried putting a sheet of my favorite cotton bond paper for formal letters on the top of the paper already stacked in the tray of the Epson Artisan 800 (which would jam my HP). It picked it up without hesitation and printed with no problem!

And I love the dual paper tray on the 800 which means I can keep two sizes of paper loaded at once (either 4x6 or 5x7, along with a larger size). My HP will take 4x6 but it has to be fed a sheet at a time and if I don't take the paper out of the regular tray it will pick up that instead.

The CD printing utility on the printer is pretty quick and easy to use to take photos from a memory card or USB drive and make custom-printed CD's. Some of the finer points such as adjusting the margins on the CD will take some learning but a basic CD can be produced in minutes with following instructions. I was actually able to do it with only minimal reference to the instructions once I got started. It's fairly intuitive.

The instruction book that comes with the printer makes it easy to figure out how to use the CD printing tool as well as the other custom features of the printer. Epson deserves credit for well-written instructions (and a very user-friendly interface) on the Artisan 800.

Yeah, but can it print? Most definitely - and fast! Epson isn't kidding when they say the Artisan 800 can do a 4x6 in 10 seconds. I tried comparing a sample 4x6 print from the HP and the Epson of the same image. To the naked eye the differences are striking. (The differences aren't nearly so obvious in the scans I tried to make of them to show here, unfortunately.) The color saturation on the Epson Artisan 800 was clearly far superior to my HP that I always thought was fairly good. The image was of Minnie Mouse with my daughter - the black and red in Minnie Mouse was much more rich and saturated in the Epson print and the white was crisper. The pale colors of skin tones and my daughter's strawberry blonde hair weren't washed out in the Epson like using the HP.  I couldn't believe how fast the Artisan 800 printed even an 8x10.

One quick note about the limitations of this printer that will be of interest to some scrapbookers: like most scanners, the scanner bed does not accommodate a full 12x12 layout. Because of the way that the screen on the front of the printer comes up alongside the scanner bed, you will have to curve your layout a bit if you want to lay it on the scanner to create a scan to stitch from. There is a nice area that gently curves away from the scanner bed on the front side for this, but if you have a habit of creating unbendable 12x12 layouts and then wanting to scan them, you won't be able to do that with this scanner. For me, its not likely to be a problem because of the way I scrap, but for a few people who use a lot of chipboard it might be. Here is what it looks like with a 12x12 layout on the scanner with the lid closed:

I haven't tried the scanner very much yet or features like the document feeder or done very extensive printing...but from my "first look" at this I would definitely recommend that if you are in the market for a serious quality printer, check out that Staples sale on the Epson Artisan 800 on Friday!