UPDATE Nov 2012: I upgraded to Windows 8 a couple of weeks ago the day after it first came out, and I wanted to say that this printer has no problems in Windows 8. Works perfectly.
Old Review: This printer arrived a few days ago, and it was like Christmas Morning. What tech guy doesn't like playing with new tech stuff? There was so much to play with on this device, that setting it up was just FUN. That's not really an issue with the printer itself, more my perceptions and experiences with it, but I wanted to say it anyway. NOTE: I am using Windows 7 64bit Home Premium.
First off, the thing is BIG. Now I wasn't expecting a tiny little compact thing, mind you. You don't get a full function device like this and expect it to be small. But it was way bigger than I anticipated. It's roughly 18 inches wide by 17 inches deep and 14 inches tall. It didn't fit where my old printer was - the table the old one sat on is JUST too small for this, which made for some shuffling of furniture and whatnot. Additionally, anything other than your default paper gets loaded via a backside paper loader. Your primary paper (for me, 8.5x11) is loaded in a tray that disappears completely inside the printer. But anything else (manual feed, envelopes) go in via the back paper loader, and it extends out the already large footprint of the thing. It's not much, just an inch or two, but you will need some sort of extra space in the back, you can't just push it against a wall, and expect to be able to use the back paper loader. Additionally, anything the device outputs comes out the front. Which also has an extender to cradle the printed papers. Which extends the front of the thing out about another eight inches when fully extended. If you don't do that, the paper will NOT stay in the printer and falls on the floor. Additionally, the box it shipped in is itself even larger. It's all protective foam and whatnot inside there, but the box the UPS guy delivered was quite large.
Once you take it out of the box, you'll find a ton of little bits of blue tape all over the outside (and inside). This is pretty much to keep all the sensitive bits from sliding around and getting damaged. You need to pull all the blue tape off first, and once you get the ones off that let you access the inside of the printer, there's some on the inside two, and two bits to remove from in there that were protecting the scanner guts. There's a piece of paper taped to the outside of the printer showing you what to remove from the inside. There is an instruction sheet showing the order of getting stuff set up. I followed it, as since this is a brand new printer (as of the time of my writing), I assumed Windows wouldn't have proper drivers for it, and let the ESPON install disk do it's thing. Normally I just hook up a device and let Windows find the drivers, to bypass all the crapware that most install discs put on there, but this one wasn't bad. Installed the printer, got it setup on my network and all that. The four ink cartridges come in vacuum packed seals, and you're recommended not to open them until you're putting them in the printer. You're supposed to shake them before putting them in the printer, but I missed that instruction. It didn't seem to affect anything though. During setup, you're asked if you want to set up the printer wirelessly or via a "temporary USB connection", that is labeled as "recommended". Yet they don't include a USB cable for you to use. Odd, that.
There are two parts where the initial set up really slows down. One is the priming of the ink cartridges. You follow the instructions on the little screen on the printer, and once you get the cartridges in there, it has to initialize them (whatever that means). This does mean a 12 minute delay (felt longer, but I didn't time it) while it gets itself ready. They tell you not to interrupt it, or open any doors while it's going on or it will "waste ink". While I did as I was told, it did bog down. Additionally, I updated the firmware during the install as well, and that was another 10 minute or so "twiddle my thumbs watching not much of anything" moment. Necessary I suppose, but don't expect to be printing five minutes after you get the thing out of the box. I set up wirelessly. I do wonder if the speed of setup was slowed down because I did it via wireless.
The printer works either via a hardwired connection or wireless. There's a hardwired network jack on the back, or it works over your local network via 802.11/b/g/n connections. The printer didn't see my "N" connection, so it connected to my "G" one. Not a huge deal really, just odd that it didn't see the "N". The wireless is nice because the printer can more easily work over your network as opposed to the older fashioned "shared printer" concept.
I'm also an iPad owner, and earlier this year when Apple introduced the concept of AirPrint, I thought it was gonna be cool to print from my iPad. Then I discovered the number of printers that worked with that was limited to a handful of HP units, and nothing else worked (easily, anyway). There was a small paper inside the box here saying this printer worked with iOS AirPrint, but only after a firmware update (which is the aforementioned one I talked about earlier). Once I got everything set up, I was quite surprised to see that feature work. It will stop quite a few things my wife would forward me and say "Please print this". :)
There's also another cool feature which I doubt I'll use much, but it's nice that it's there. Print via email. During setup, you get a page printed telling you about the printer's capability to print stuff you email to a specific address. That address is printed on the paper. I tried it out, and it does work. It's kind of cool that you can do this, I suppose it's a way if you're away from the printer and need to get something to someone where your printer is that you can do that. The email address is quite long and complicated, but I do wonder about the spam capabilities there.
The auto feed scanner will do double side scanning, which is nice. I don't have many print and scan jobs that require double sided stuff, but it's nice to know it's there just the same.
Here's some remarks about the various sections of the device's functionality:
Scanner: The EPSON Scan software that gets installed during installation does the job. It's certainly better than the stuff that I was using before on my old scanner, which was the stuff built directly into Windows. This has a lot more detail including dust removal & back light correction, which is a big deal to me, as I have a boatload of old pictures that need to be scanned, and that definitely helps. The speed of the scanner was quite good. Sure, you can jack up the DPI and really slow things down, but for standard scanning, it does the job quite well. The resultant quality of the scans is good as well. Don't know how to compare that to other scanners, just that what it scans looks good, so I guess that's OK, eh? :) There is OCR software on the install CD, but I opted not to install that, so I can't remark on how well it works. A nice upgrade on what I was using before, which was well, not good. You can also scan to email, scan to PC, or scan straight to a PDF. It's a nice selection of options depending on what your needs are for that particular scan. The resultant scans of photographs came out quite nice. Obviously if the picture is too old and too beat up, that's not the scanner's fault, but it does seem to do a good job at auto removing some damage to old photographs.
Printing: I tried printing several different kinds of things during my setup and initial testing. The standard "test page", and a few photos and various documents and whatnot. Despite not having "custom" paper to print photos on, I printed 'em on plain old printer paper, and they still looked pretty decent, so I imagine proper printing paper for photos would look quite good. The printer is quite fast, even when printing photos. Granted, printing a photo isn't as fast as printing just a page of black and white text obviously, it was still snappier than I thought it would be. Word documents are quite crisp and easy to read. Pages with color accents on mostly black and white printed pretty much as fast as an all black text page did. Given printing is the majority of what I'll use this device for, I was impressed at all my attempts to throw print jobs at it. EPSON claims the printer ink will look good printing pictures on any kind of paper. It does seem better on standard paper than special paper, so I'll buy that. Again, plain text and document printing looks quite crisp. Their tech claims that the documents printed will last 118 years. I seriously doubt I'll still be around to check that claim out for myself.
Fax: Initially the print to fax didn't work right out of the box. The setup disc added two printers to my "Devices" tab. One for the printer, and one for the fax. The fax one was greyed out and didn't work when I tried to use it for the first time. I looked into the settings, and Windows (or the EPSON Setup) had assigned the port to LPT1:, the old style of printer port. The "printing" area of the new printer was working fine, and it was on some new EPSON port. So I manually changed the port for the Fax to the same as the printer, and it worked fine. I was able to test it by faxing a dummy fax to 1-888-877-1655 (a toll free number for a site called faxtoy daht net). You can look on that site and see your test, as they post everything they receive there. An inbound test worked too via the site faxzero daht cahm. So the fax worked quite well. I really liked being able to "print" to the fax machine.
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