Cheap Epson Stylus Photo 870 Inkjet Printer (Electronics) (Macintosh, Windows Me, PowerMac, Windows NT 5, Windows NT 4, Windows NT 3.5) Price

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Customer Reviews of Epson Stylus Photo 870 Inkjet Printer

expensive cartridges and a menace to the environment
Forget about it. My husband and I bought this printer a while ago, and all I can say is that it hurts my stomach every time I use it. The cartridges are overly expensive, and once any of the four colors of the color cartridge runs out, it refuses to print, even if you are not using that specific color. Then the cartridges are absolutely unrecyclable. Nobody accepts it, and when I called customer service which is located in Canada, they told me that they are saving the ones they use, just in case they become recyclable at some point. We feel terrible about junking this bundle of polluting plastic, so we use it when needed, but if we could go back, we would NEVER, EVER buy this printer. If you think the price is nice, make your calculations with the expense of cartridges. Laser printers are going down in price and are as good as this, the prints will last longer, and they are not as environmentally unconscious.

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Six months with Epson 870
I use this printer for semi-professional image production making fine art-type 8x10 prints. Color saturation is very uniform with great depth and fine color matching, print after print. Lucky for me, the monitor and Adobe Photoshop are very accurate, so I do get what I see on the screen. My gallery prints are mostly 7x9, using a tiff setting on the 1.3 meg Olympus, I get a large file that can handle 7x9 in.just fine. One complaint, this printer really uses up the color ink cart. I count average of 36 full color 7x9 prints on heavy matt paper! When the cart. is low, the software will take it down even lower on nxt. boot-up and then you will not be able to use even the full blk.cart., thus locking up the printer until you put in a new color cart. I think the idea is to sell more $24. ink cartridges.

the results are worth it for me and perhaps for you.

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Ok photoprint, good general use
I bought the Epson Photo Stylus on the basis on superior technical stats and excellent reviews from numerous sources (ZdNet, ComputerShopper etc ...). I have been mostly happy with it as a general purpose printer but I have found it somewhat frustrating to use as a photo printer.

The printer is easy to install and easy to calibrate. The print quality is good and the bundled extras are ok (Photo Delux is very useful, Epson Photo Factory is very light weight).

However, it is very difficult to achieve "photolab" quality results without significant tinkering. I find that only very good quality digital pictures will print to near (emphasize near) photo quality if done on the correct paper (only Epson brand matte paper seems to work) after 2 or 3 attempts at modifying the colour and print settings. I am sure that I could eliminate my need to play around with the setting with some more experimentation but it is going to take a lot more time and ink/paper to finally get the hang of it. If you are buying this printer expecting to get photo quality results out of the box, please be aware that this is not going to happen.

I am sure that true photo buffs can get excellent results with this printer but the average consumer is going to be a little frustrated. On the other hand, it makes a great general purpose colour printer that produces good quality output for print and graphics.