Printers are an expensive business, so unlike the old day’s when you could go get any printer and it would do, these day’s we have a plethora of choice staring at use, some offering standard printouts, some offering the best photo technology yet and some offering scanners and photocopiers as well as a humble printer to boot. So what’s with all the choice? Well it all depends on what you are actually going to be using your printer for. If it’s for letters, homework, general house stuff or playing around with, then you can’t really go far wrong with the Epson C62.
Now, I’m a bloke who favours HP printers when it comes down to it, I prefer them for their print quality, put an Epson print next to a HP print on normal mode on roughly the same priced printers and I bet the HP will win hands down every time in terms of print and colour quality. Also the HP’s sharpness cannot be matched by the Epson. However, when it comes to buying those all elusive ink cartridges you will soon have a shock when you see the Jet Tec cartridges lined up next to the HP cartridges and wishing you had an Epson. So it was on this basis that I recently purchased 11 Epson C62’s for general printing (prescriptions and patient leaflets) for a local surgery. They already had a few HP’s and were getting increasingly worried about
their ink cartridge bills! For printing off prescriptions and patient leaflets on standard photocopy paper, the C62 fitted the bill perfectly, and it will for most of your home printing needs too.
Available for £69.99 on Amazon this printer isn’t on the cheapest side. We have the lexmarks coming in at £29 and HP’s are a little cheaper. We also have the younger brother of the C62 coming in cheaper, the C42, which I have already wrote about. The C62 though is a little more sturdy, makes (marginally) less noise and is built to print a bit more than the C42, however, the only notable difference from the C42 is that the C62 comes with both a Parallel and USB port built into it, whereas the C42 has one or the other depending on which you buy.
THE PRINTER
The printer itself is not all that solidly built I have to say. It’s very light in weight for a printer and the plastic casing isn’t of the best quality. We have a grey, rounded printer which feeds the paper in from the back. On top of the printer is a darker but transparent lid, which when opened does nothing, so you can open the lid should you wish too while the printer is printing, unlike faithful HP’s. When you do open the lid, inside you have a lot of small moving parts which always worries me. Things don’t look to be built to a great standard, everything is plasticy and it looks as if it’s going to break down on the first printout, however, respect where it’s due, non have broken so far, apart from one, but that was broken actually inside the box.
The printer feeds the paper from the back, so paper comes out of the front when printed onto a retractableholder which does hold paper, but not much of it it has to be said, as the weight of the paper that’s hanging off this retractable holder just falls off if you don’t use the whole length of the holder.
When you first turn on the printer and install the cartridges, you’ll notice that the printer decides to have a little playtime and mess around making a load of noise and generally annoying you. This is a process called charging the ink, something which Epson printers seem to like doing. Once this is done, it will only normally do it daily, when you send something to print the first time in the morning for instance. It takes about a minute to complete and a lot of noise happens, again something that doesn’t happen with good old HP’s (I must keep remembering why I bought these printers!!).
Sending a page to print will basically give you the same noise but for a shorter period of time and once it actually does start printing, the noise level is quite acceptable, it’s just all the noise that it creates in between and before printing that really will start to annoy you over time, though you will probably just get used to it, and if you have used Lexmark printers before you will be used to it anyway!
On top of the printer you have 3 (again) plasticy buttons. One for the power, one to feed a sheet of paper through (never really seen the point in that) and one to bring the ink cartridge cradle into the middle of the printer so that you can change the cartridges (wey hey, something which Epson’s didn’t give you the pleasure of pushing before now on their lower end printers!).
PRINT QUALITY
Using normal mode this printer will give you acceptable quality prints, ok, quite good prints. The black is good, but when using colour text, it seems to me that the colour text is actually bolder than the black text, making things look a bit funny sometimes. This is something that brings the printer down in terms of quality. However, when used in ‘best’ or ‘presentation’ mode the printer will give you the kind of print you would expect for the mode you have selected, but still, not as good as HP’s in my opinion.
The printer has a 5760 dpi resolution, which believe me, is a lot, though having printed photo’s on one of these little printers, it doesn’t compare to a ‘photo printer’ which are on the market, but above the £100 mark and then some. It does the job, but other photo printers will do the job a lot better, but you’d expect that, you haven’t paid the price tag for such a print out.
For the price tag, this printer prints well, and for homework, letters etc etc is more than good, excellent I would go as far as saying. Play around with the paper types and modes and you’ll no doubt get the even better quality that you want, though I have never had the need to do so.
CONSUMABLES
Now this is where this printer comes into it’s own and this is the reason I purchased 11 of them! Consumables for Epsons are probably the cheapest out there. What I mean by consumables is basically Ink Cartridges, something which is probably costing printer owners all over the country a fortune. When you consider than an Epson (Jet Tec compatible) black cartridge for the C62 can cost as little as £4 depending on where you buy them, compared to a HP black cartridge for around £18, your laughing. The same goes for the colour cartridges, being around £6 for Epson’s and £23 for HP’s. This was the reason I bought the Epson C62’s, and this is what makes them so great for home or home office based printing. However, I must stress here, if you do use these Jet Tec compatible cartridges, you will end up voiding the warranty, which is as standard one year. I have never had any problems whatsoever with Jet Tec cartridges though and can whole heartedly recommend them as a substitute to the ridiculously overpriced Original Epson cartridges.
However, after saying all this about the low prices, I have been caught out. You see, HP’s generally (depending on the printer model) have more Ink in their cartridges compared to the Epson’s, so you’ll probably find yourself making your way through more Epson cartridges than you would if you had a HP. Though I reckon it still turns out a hell of a lot cheaper a printer to run than a HP.
OVERALL
When all is said and done, it’s a printer and it just exactly what it says it will do, print. However, this would not be suited to a work environment where 10 users are all using the same printer, likewise it wouldn’t be all that suitable for a secretary printing off 50 letters a day. It is suitable for home based use and small offices that don’t do all that much printing (I’m talking over 20 pages a day). It’s not suitable for Photo work, though it doesn’t state that it is. It’s a noisy little printer, but good for the money.
I personally would prefer a HP, but you have to accept the price of cartridges. If it came down to it, after seeing these in action, I would probably go for the Epson, because I’m a cheapskate and like me, if you would rather spend your money on better stuff than ink, you two should go for the Epson.
Remember, it doesn’t come with any form of cable, and neither do any other printers, so you will have to purchase your cables separately if you don’t already have them.
It gets 3 out of 5 from me. It looses 1 star because of it’s noise, another for the build quality and another for the not so good colour printing next to black text. It regains a star for the price of it’s consumables and running costs!
How helpful would this review be to a person making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
Advantages: fast, quality prints, photos and documents, the ink lasts and it is very cheap Disadvantages: comes with no USB cables and printer leads and can be a bit noisy
Kirki 19.06.2003 ·
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of Epson Stylus C62
Advantages: fast, quality prints, photos and documents, the ink lasts and it is very cheap Disadvantages: comes with no USB cables and printer leads and can be a bit noisy
Kirki 19.06.2003 ·
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of Epson Stylus C62
Advantages: Good value for money printer with reasonably priced ink cartridges, Excellent print quality Disadvantages: Occasional banding and missing colours when print head needs cleaning
masterluke 09.06.2003 ·
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
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Mar 31st, 2003
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