printers

Epson Stylus C80 Color Inkjet Printer

Rating:

By Joel Shore

Ok, so this is one of Epson’s weirder looking printers. I kept opening the top, expecting to see some freshly steamed hot dogs and buns inside.

The Stylus C80 is a great choice for a home office or for the kids. Not does it produce crisp results, it can actually save money.

Epson was smart enough to use a separate ink cartridge for each ink color. So when little Patrick keeps printing his drawings, complete with acres of blue sky, you’ll replace only the blue cartridge. That’s a major plus.

(Like commercial printing presses, most inkjet printers combine four colors—cyan, magenta, yellow, and black—to get the full rainbow of printed colors. And most inkjets use a single cartridge to hold the cyan, magenta, and yellow inks. When any one color ran out, you had to replace the whole cartridge.)

Another great feature is the printer’s resolution. Resolution is the number of ink dots per linear inch that any printer is capable of laying down. More dots means a better image with greater crispness and detail.

The Stylus C80 prints at a terrific high resolution of 2,880 x 720 dots per inch (dpi). Do the math: that’s 2,073,600 dots per square inch! Of course, the more dots per inch, the better the image. That means a 4" x 6" photo (24 square inches) lays down a whopping 49,766,400 dots! That’s a lot of processing.

We like lots of dots. But on the downside, more dots can slow down a printer. Fortunately, we didn’t have that problem with the Stylus C80. The printer is rated to crank out about 20 pages of black-only text per minute. And that full-color 4" x 6" digital photograph, with its nearly 50 million individual dots, should print in about 22 seconds. Not bad for $129.

I’d print at 2,880 x 720 only for final output. For drafts, or just to get an idea of how a page will look, you can print at much lower resolutions. It’s not only a lot faster, but you’ll save a whole lot of valuable ink.

Documents that I printed from Word and Excel looked just fine, with nice, crisp text. Then I printed a couple of 3-megapixel digital photos onto Epson’s 4" x 6" glossy photo paper. The results were excellent. If I were serious about printing lots of photos, I might spend a bit more money and opt for one of Epson’s photo printers. They use six ink colors instead of four. But no matter; for most home office and student users, this printer is a good match.

Ink Vending Machine. Like any inkjet printer, it’s not really the printer that you pay for in the long run, it’s the ink refills you keep buying year after year (well, month after month, actually). Think of it like this: The product you are buying is not so much a printer as it is an ink vending machine. And stay away from those silly ink-injection replacement kits. They’re not only messy, their dye-based inks are all wrong for this printer, which uses pigment-based inks. Pigment-based inks are less susceptible to the damaging effects of light and humidity. Photos should last a very long time.

You can pay a lot more—and a lot less—for an inkjet printer, but you’ll find that the Stylus C80 is an excellent choice and an outstanding value. I just might use mine to print a photo of that hot dog I kept looking for!<