Epson Artisan 800 Printer: The Long-Haul Review

Four months ago I did a first look review at the Epson Artisan 800 printer shortly after receiving it. Now, after having it around to work with for awhile day-in and day-out, let's talk about how it did over the longer haul for me.

After the initial honeymoon period of being impressed with the superb quality that this printer is capable of putting out, using it began to get rather frustrating, actually. It is somewhat like a thoroughbred animal that needs delicate handling to perform at its finest: capable of excellence, but needing an awful lot of attention to do it.

The Epson Artisan 800 is extremely sensitive to changes in its print settings. Miniscule changes in settings (paper type, print quality) actually makes a noticeable difference in the output of the machine, unlike with many printers. That is a good thing for the print quality that you can get out of it - you have a high element of control and adjustment to work with. The problem is that being off just a bit in your settings (paper type, for instance) can result in a very poor print, and it can take some time and wasted supplies to get it right.

I also found that because of the printer's sensitivity, printing the same file through different print drivers resulted in drastically different outputs. Printing via Photoshop Elements using either printer or software color control, and directly from Windows Explorer, yielded three completely different print results for the same file. (I'd show you but the results don't scan well for comparison.)

The Windows print was sharper, than the Elements prints, which had a noticeable softness. In Elements, depending on whether I chose printer or software control for the color, it produced very brown or very pink skin tones in the print. The printer's profile was installed, which should have minimized that. (And neither of those color variations came close to the accuracy of the Shutterfly print I'd had made from this same file.) These variations could easily give you fits trying to produce consistent results from print to print if you don't use the exact same printing method and supplies every time.

The Artisan 800 printer driver gave me difficulty in other ways too. For some reason, the part of the driver that sits on my computer and monitors the printers ink levels lost the ability to see the printer on the network shortly after I installed the printer - rendering that driver function useless. I never was able to get it fixed, and there is no way to uninstall that part of the software without uninstalling the entire printer off of your system. So I ended up stuck with a piece of broken software on my system that I could not remove. It could possibly have been fixed by uninstalling and reinstalling the entire printer, but that process was such a pain there was no way I was going to go through it just to be able to see ink levels on my computer that are available to me on the machine itself as well.

I also discovered after my initial successful test that it was in fact necessary to empty the full-size paper tray if I wanted to change the type of paper I was putting into it. I couldn't just put a sheet of photo paper on top of my standard printing paper or it would pick up two sheets, resulting in wasted ink, paper and time.

That said, there are actually some good things about this printer.

I was most impressed by the archival tests I ran on Epson's inks in this printer. One of the reasons I haven't printed my photos at home until now is concern about archival life compared to lab prints. I soaked a print from this Artisan 800's Claria ink in water for an hour, and then rubbed on it and tried to smear it. Other than some scratching in the glossy surface from rubbing on the paper while it was soft from being soaked, the printing itself stood up with no damage. There was no running, smearing or blurring. This result convinced me that I would use Claria inks for scrapbook printing in the future in the right machine.

The scanner on the Artisan 800 is quiet and very fast. It gives good but not fabulous results, and the lid extension is not sufficient for handling items that have very much thickness. It did not allow the lid to lie flat with thicker items (such as books), resulting in flare. This is not a machine intended for heavy, detailed scanning work, but as a copier and fax and for limited scanning work, it is very serviceable.

I do a lot of small printing on special items (chiefly envelopes and labels). I was able to print 4x6 label sheets and envelopes very easily from the paper tray, and they moved through the machine with no problem. The only downside is that the part of the tray you are using has to be emptied, and in the case of envelopes, you have to adjust the guides in the tray bottom as well. Considering the HP I am used to using has a dedicated slot in the tray just for feeding these items, the Epson inconvenience was notable to me.

Borderless prints are a nice feature of the Epson Artisan 800. The ability to get full-size prints using a piece of 4x6 photo paper is almost a necessary feature these days. This printer performs the task well, with no noticeable degradation near the photo edges.

There are a lot of cool extras on this printer: coloring book page creation, printing ruled paper, restoring of images. But on a day-to-day basis most of us won't be using those. They are fun toys, but usually most of us will be doing routine printing, copying, scanning, and faxing.

Bottom line on the Epson Artisan 800: It can give you amazing print quality, but it will make you work hard to get it.