Epson RX620 All-in-One Printer : Read product information and read reviews

Author's product rating:

Picture quality	Satisfactory
Printing speed	Slow
Colour sensitivity	Satisfactory
Ease of use	Easy
Value For Money	Satisfactory

Advantages:	3 in one - printer, scanner, photocopyer, plus media card reader
Disadvantages:	Big, bulky, print quality questionable

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

Let's face it, if you're going to buy a printer then you should certainly be looking at the Epson range with a wide variety of printers at different price points from the entry level all the way up to photo quality.

I have always had Epson - my first printer was an old Inkjet 620 and I have always liked what they do including print quality. If you anted a printer that could perform like a laser, Epson certainly lead the way. With the transisiton to inkjets, so printers became more and more affordable whilst continually imprving int he quality department. And so much so we now have a few contenders all out there to prove a point - HP, Canon, Lexmark to name a few. Good for the consumer - undoubtedly.

More recetly the time came to upgrade my computer, and with that the chance to upgrade my printer from the Epson Stylus 740 - one of my all time favourites. But this time is wasn't just a question of gettig a printer - I wanted t get rid of my bulky scanner as well - pretty much no point having one with all in ones available.

So after some researching and reviewing, and to stay with a brand I trust (and had no reason to change) I plumped for the RX620 - most reviewers giving it a "good" rating. And additionally this came with a very handy memory card reader for direct printing and also a USB port.

The main thing about this printer on first sight is it's size - it's a tad large down to the inbuilt scanner. That is one thing you must realise about these 3 in 1's is that you get convenience, but if you want an A4 scanner, it has to be A4 size obviously.

Plugging it in and loading the accompanying CD software is a cinch. No more than 5 minutes after putting the CD in the computer tray, my printer was happily purring away to me with a welcoming message.

There are 6 inks in total - so this helps with wastage as in teh past if my 3 colour cartridge ran out of yellow the whole darn priter would stop and complain, and wouldn't do anything else unless you replaced it - even though the other 2 inks may have still been available! So if you printed too much of one colour you could find yourself throwing away a cartridge a 1/3rd empty. Ouch.

With the new system of seperate inks (yellow, black, light Cyan, cyan, light magenta, magenta) it does mean that when you run out you only have to replace the dead cartridge. Be warned. Genuine cartridges are expensive. A new set could cost you £50. The cheapest Epson printer is £49.99!! And whilst it sounds ludicrous, you could just buy a new printer every time your inks run out. That doesn't really help the planet though does it?

So what about functions.

Scanner: The scanner is a very high quailty one indeed and my first scan of a photograph was highly impressive - colour, hue, saturation all mixed perfectly and it produced a pleasing result. Key is the thought of the scanner. Rather than just scannin A4, the scanner will automatically stop when it senses there is no more to scan. So in the past when scanning a photo, my old scanner would give me an A4 page with a photo in the top left hand corner. Not this one. All you get is what you want to scan. And of-course there are lots of features on the scanner to adjust if you wish. Quality, size, image output type, resolution and more. Importantly, its quite quick too.

Card Reader: The card reader is every bity as helpful as you can imagine. This means you don't need to trun on the PC to print out pictures. It accepts Flash Cards, SD and pro cards. If you have got your PC on, the card reader is available as another drive letter (typically "removable disk") which makes browsing even easier. You can view your Pictures via a small LCD screen built in and use the printer multitude of buttons for navigation. I have printed a couple of photos using this method, and it was relatively easy.

Printer: Well this is what I bought this puppy for. My first print out of a letter in standard mode was very disappointing. Standard mode looked like some second rate, 1980's dot matrix printer and the quality was cheap - the only plus point, lightning quick. So I upped the level to "photo" and the printer produced an excellent quality letter - you would be hard pressed to tell the difference between that and a laser. The only downside and this is a BIG one - 2 minutes to print a SINGLE A4 letter.

Next photos. The Epson RX620 comes with a wide range of printing outputs all chosen through the printer software, The majority of my prints were coming from MS Word, or MS Publisher - 2 of the most common applications. I even tried photoshop.

Again, the quality of the images was poor. Reds were so red it made people in particular look like they were going to explode. Even with a high res photo, photo quality inkjet paper from Kodak and the very best setting available to print with, the photos were still remarkably of a lower quality than my Stylus 740. By the end of the first print run of 6 A4 photos, my ink was virtually gone and I had spent over an hour in my room!!

To give the printer a little credit, I was more pleased with the output of photographs taken outside. The ones taken in artificial light suffered more at the hands of this Epson.

I ran some diagnostics on the printer and to my horror found that the inbuilt functions were reporting/showing some alignment issues and also clogged heads. So I immediatley ran the self clean and realign features to sort this out.

After 4 cleans the printer finally printed out a test sheet I was happy with and I powered down and went to get a well earned cup of tea.

A few days later I went back to my machine and fire it up and started printing more photos in best mode. After thr first one came out I abandonded the run as the photos did not look right at all. I rechecked the nozzles and found once again they were clogged and yest another cleaning cycle was required. Sadly, after completing this cycle, the inks were virtually exhausted and the RX620 refused to play any further.

After sorting out the initial teething issues I had (and contacting Epson) I am still suffering from mediocre photo quality and letter that need to go through "photo" mode in order to look half decent.

All in all, as a replacement for 3 things in my old printer my scanner and my unfeasibly large photocopier, it's a bargain. Running costs are pretty high again that depends on useage.

My advice woul dbe to get a proper photo printer if you are only doing 6 x 4 prints. The Epson Picturemate 500 is exceptional (and will be reviewed here soon!) and it's a steal at £89.99.

The RX620 just tries to hard to be all things and as such the main feature of printing has suffered. Overall it's not bad, but then again as someone who "used" to love everything Epson, I am now looking elsewhere for my next printer.

For the photo enthusiast, this is NOT the printer.

For the replacement of your scanner, photocopier (if you had one), printer and the luxury of a card reader plus additional USB port then it's worth considering but there are better now available.