I tell you, you would not believe the amount of time I spent umming and arrginh about which printer to buy myself. I have spent many a long hour browsing away at online shops, trying to find the best deal, and many miles walking around computer stores trying to find an elusive special offer. You’d think it would be easy for me to make a decision, as in my job you can’t afford to be indecisive, but it has taken me about 4 months to finally decide which printer to buy! I’m normally very good at shopping and find spending money very, very easy indeed. But if I’m spending over £50 it takes me ages to decide what to buy.
So how did I finally come to a decision, and how did I decide?
The overriding factor when deciding which printer to buy it to look at what you are gong to use it for. There’s not point buying an all singing, all dancing printer costing several hundred pounds if all you are going to use if for is to print out some letter. Conversely there is no point skimping on cost if you need a quality printer for photographs or presentations. I was after a printer to use mainly for printing word-processed document, but I also wished to have a printer that had the flexibility to print photographs and leaflets to an adequate quality. I also wanted a printer that would print pages fairy quickly, as I’ve had a slow printer before and I get really frustrated just waiting for a page to come out of the tray!
The next factor is to look at your budget. Obviously the more you spend, the better the printer, and if you need a high performance printer it is not going to come cheap, but there is no point buying a cheap model if you need one with a high spec, as it just won’t perform. Having said that, there are a lot of fairly good quality printers available for less than £100 (I should know, remember all that research I mentioned!). I had a budget of £90, but that had to include the cost of the cable as well.
Another thing to check is what sort of connection you need to your computer. There is no point
going out and buying a Parallel printer that is cheap if you’ve only got a USB computer. I’ve got an iMac, which is USB only, so surprise surprise I needed a USB printer. Most printers nowadays are either USB or dual USB/Parallel printers, so this did not restrict my choice too much.
There are several differences between these printers. The first of these is the resolution, or dpi. An inkjet printer squirts dots of ink through nozzles to form the test or picture you are printing. The more dots used per inch, the sharper the picture. It’s not quite as simple as that as the quality of the image produced depends on other factors such as the ink and paper used, but generally a bigger dpi figure means a sharper picture. Be careful not to use this figure as the sole basis for purchasing a printer, as for the vast majority of the time you will not use the maximum available resolution. For text you will rarely use a setting above 600 dpi, but it is nice to have the flexibility of being able to produce a sharper image if required.
The next difference is in the print speeds. Again think about the sort of printing you are going to do a lot of. There is no point buying a printer which prints black and white pages quickly and colour slowly, if all you are going to print is photographs. Also, be careful not to pay too much attention to the published figures. Manufacturers obviously try to make their printer sound as good as possible and will publish the fastest speed that is theoretically possible from the printer, usually a text document in draft mode. In reality this figure may be different from the speed you will achieve printing a typical page. Use the figures as a rough guide, but make sure you treat them as rough and not gospel! The best way to get an accurate view of the speed of a printer is to go to a reputable retailer and ask them to print you some test pages from the various models you are interested in. This way you can judge the quality and the print speed for yourself.
Something that is often overlooked by people buying a printer is the ink cartridges themselves. Often the printer comes with a cartridge only half full, so you may have to buy a replacement sooner than you think, and the price of a replacement cartridge can be a bit of a shock! Find out the cost of replacement print cartridges, bearing in mind that the cartridges for some printers will print more pages on average than those for a different model, so an exact like for like comparison is not always possible. Also find out it there are generic cartridges available for your printer, rather than the manufacturers own make. Buying a compatible cartridge made by WHSmith instead of Epson for example can save you up to 70%, which can work out to over £10 per cartridge. Manufacturers always recommend that you only use their branded cartridges and threaten that you may invalidate your warranty if you use a compatible product instead, but in 3 years of owning an inkjet printer I have always used the cheaper compatible cartridges and never had a problem with quality or the function of my printer.
If you are really brave you can even refill your own print cartridges. You can now get kits supplied with ink and syringes to refill your empty ink cartridges. Most cartridges can now be refilled, just follow the enclosed instructions. As long as you are careful its not too messy and is even cheaper than buying a compatible cartridge.
Well, those are the main points to consider, looks aren’t really all that important as a printer is more functional than decorative. Oh yes, make sure you get a printer that is compatible with your printer. Sounds obvious but if you are running a Mac or an old PC you might find not all printers will work, even if you have the correct cable to attach it. I’ve suffered this problem when my Dad gave me an old printer for my Mac. I could get a cable to connect it but no driver to run the printer, so his generous gift turned into a rather expensive doorstop!
So, taking into account all the above, which printer did I finally go for? Drum roll please........
One of the reasons I bought it was I got a really good deal on an ex-display model at John Lewis, so than paying the list price of £99 I only paid £67, quite a bargain when you consider it comes with the full one year warranty.
It prints up to 2880 dpi, a higher resolution than any of the other printers I was looking at, and while I won’t use this resolution very often (it uses shed loads of ink!) it’s nice to have the flexibility of this resolution if I need it.
When I had some test pages printed it seemed a fast printer for the price, certainly a lot faster that the Canon BJC-2000 I have been using. The difference is especially notable when printing at higher resolutions and in colour. The manufacturer claims it will print up to 8 pages of text a minute in draft mode. I’ve never managed to get it to print quite that fast, but it’s still fast enough for my needs.
The 680 has two print heads so you can have a black cartridge and a colour cartridge in use simultaneously. This saves a lot of messing about changing printer cartridges. The downside of this printer is, unlike the Canon s400 and BJC-3000, there is a combined colour cartridge, so if one of the three colours in there runs out, you have to change the whole cartridge. This is not too much of a handicap as you will find that the colours are used pretty evenly in normal printing.
I think I was a little seduced by the price I managed to buy this printer for, as despite what I said above about using compatible cartridges, I’ve gone a bought a printer that you cannot yet buy a compatible printer cartridge for, so I’m stuck with buying Epson own brand cartridges, which cost around £20 for a colour cartridge and £24 for a black cartridge. This is pretty expensive, but you can print up to 600 pages from a black cartridge, and up to 300 pages with a colour cartridge, which isn’t that bad. It works out to about 4p a page for text printing and 7p a page for colour printing, which is fairly respectable, although I could have done better if I’d bought one of the Canon printers.
I compounded the error by buying a printer that uses cartridges that cannot be refilled! What was I thinking! The cartridges are so called “Epson Intellidge” cartridges which contain a chip that keeps track of ink levels. This has a plus side as you can swap around print cartridges with the computer always being able to know how much ink is left in each cartridge, but has the downside that they cannot yet be refilled. I have emailed JR, who make one of the popular refill kits, and they say they are working on a software crack that will enable you to refill these cartridges, but it has not been released yet, so I’ll just have to spend lots of money on branded cartridges in the meantime. It’s a good job I don’t do much printing!
Overall I’m happy with my purchase, the printer does everything I need, was cheap to buy, fairly quick and prints good quality images. I only wish I’d followed my own advice and bought a printer which has compatible cartridges so I could save even more money. Never mind, better luck next time. Still, it quite a stylish design with a very cool flip toppaper tray and looks good alongside my very trendy iMac!
Oh, a quick note on cables. John Lewis were selling a USB cable for £13, which I thought was a bit steep so I trotted down to Maplin Electronics and managed to buy one for only £5. They come in a range of colours, I’ve bought a very fetching blue one, so don’t get ripped off, shoppin around always pays off.
How helpful would this review be to a person making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
This is a great printer from Epson. Great review as well.
SparkyDeighton 08.03.2004 15:00
An excellent guide on how to choose a product. Well thought out and written. All reviews should be like this one.
2cay2 07.03.2004 15:23
A great op that has been really helpful to me! I need a new printer but know nothing about them. The advice given will hopefully help me get the right one! :o)
May 3rd, 2001
(May 18th, 2001)
exceptional by (3%):
very helpful by (94%):
helpful by (3%):
