An All-In-One Printer That’s All-Around-Great

Time was that all-in-one printers could fulfill variety of useful functions without being particularly good at any of them. All-in-one printers could not produce photos as well as a photo printer, could not print text as well as a dedicated inkjet, could not scan as well as a stand alone scanner and could not fax as well fax machine.

Times have changed with the wifi enabled, touchscreen equipped Epson Artisan 800.

The Artisan 800′s ability to print photos and text, to scan and to fax, rivals or exceeds most machines dedicated to those purposes. Here’s a summary of those functions from strongest to weakest:

Photo printing. The quality of the photos printed off the Artisan 800 nearly matches what you’d get through a professional developer. You could argue that, in some ways, using the Artisan 800 is better since this printer can automatically remove red-eye and restore faded photos. And you can edit the photos on the Artisan’s 7.8″ (20 cm) touchscreen. Photos can be printed off a computer (using a cord or wirelessly), directly from a camera or via a USB drive or memory card. Photos printed on the Artisan 800 will retain their full color for 95 years according to Epson. We are in the process of testing this claim and will update this post in 2106 with our results.

CD printing. Spot Cool Stuff loves this feature! Put a disc into the Epson Artisan 800′s CD tray and you can print your own label directly on the CD. Very cool.

Text printing. Epson doesn’t seem to market the Artisan 800 as the fastest all-in-one printer on the market, but we spent considerable time trying to find a faster one and were unsuccessful. The 800 prints both color and black & white sheets at 38 pages per minute. That’s faster than a lot of dedicated inkjet printers. The quality of Epson 800′s prints is better than the vast majority of inkjets too.

Faxing. The Artisan 800 lets you send faxes directly from your computer. This is the most important feature as far as Spot Cool Stuff is considered — before the Artisan we had to print out our fax and then run it through the machine. The Artisan 800 also has an ability to store 60 speed dial fax numbers and to send a fax in color. (Whether the receiving fax machine can handle a color document is a different question).

Scanning. If you are looking for a high end scanner then this is the one area you’ll be disappointed in the Artisan 800. It does not match up to the top end scanners out there. It is a very capable scanner, able to reproduce documents at 4800 dpi. The scanner also features optical character recognition, allowing users to scan text and then edit it in a word processing program.

We also like how the Artisan 800 has two paper trays. Plus the Epson Artisan 800 passes one of Spot Cool Stuff’s most important tests: It looks good.

All of which is not to say that the Artisan 800 is perfect. The paper trays are a bit flimsy and it sometimes takes some fussing to line the paper up just-so. The scanner does not work via wifi as all the other printer functions do. As with other Epson printers, you can not print a black and white document if any of the color ink trays need replacing. (If we owed the Epson company this inexplicable feature of their printers is the first thing we’d change). And, speaking of ink, the standard print settings on the Epson are rather ink heavy. If you switch to “draft” mode the print quality does not suffer much and the ink lasts much longer.

Add it all up and we highly recommend the Epson Artisan 800.

FROM BUY.COM | FROM AMAZON |

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