The Epson Stylus Photo 830 is an excellent value for money printer (currently around £90). In fact initially I was considering buying an Epson Stylus C62, but because there's very little difference at all price-wise between the two, I took advantage of the Photo 830’s 6 coloured inks over the C62's 4 colour printing. Epson's have unbeatable print quality as far as I am concerned, especially when it comes to printing glossy photos which is my main intended use of the printer. Ideal for printing scanned or digital camera images. Also good quality text output too.
The printer comes supplied with; two ink cartridges (black & colour), mains lead, printer driver CD, Harry Potter Print Studio CD, quick-start instructions and a selection of sample print media to for you to try out. A printed manual is absent but a manual in HTML is supplied on CD. Also, although the printer has both USB and bi-directional parallel interfaces, neither a USB or parallel printer cable is supplied.
–-Ink Consumption–-
I've had my Epson Photo 830 for 6 months now, at present there's plenty of black ink left (around 75% full) but the colour cartridge is getting low (around 25% full) for which I already have a spare for when it does run out. Not bad, my printer usage hasn’t been that heavy though (yet). The ink cartridges seem reasonably priced at approx. £17 for the black cartridge and £14 for the colour cartridge.
––Design/Build–-
My previous printer was an Epson Stylus Colour 600, as good as it was in it's time it wasn't very robust, I had a few bits of plastic here and there snapping off! Hence my reason for buying a new printer after it eventually broke down completely. Thankfully the Epson Stylus Photo 830 is much better designed, visually it looks very flashy too.
–-Features–-
Drivers for Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP; Mac OS 8.1+ including OSX
6 Colour QuickDry inks. Colour cartridge - light cyan, cyan, light magenta, magenta, yellow and a black cartridge.
Up to 5760 DPI from the Micro Piezo print head.
Optional borderless printing.
Auto sheet-feeder takes up to 100 sheets of A4 paper (depending on the thickness/weight), easily adjusted for different sizes, A5, A6 etc. and for printing envelopes.
Print speeds of up to 14ppm black, and 13.7ppm colour. It's very fast at printing plain text documents. Obviously print speeds will be much slower when printing glossy photos at a higher DPI.
I highly recommend the Epson Photo 830. It may be worth my while mentioning that Epson supply brochures and sample photo glossy printouts upon request – which I requested myself via their website before I made my choice.
Final note – the Epson Photo 830 has now been superseded by the Epson Photo 830U which seems to have the same specifications except for an additional USB port (located in the front panel).
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Jun 9th, 2003
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