Nov 16, 2004 04:08 PM
24256 Views
(Updated Mar 07, 2005 10:53 PM)
I purchased this printer one month back mainly for printing letters and special document. For other office I have dotmatrix printer. Even though Hewlet Packard is the industry standard in Inkjet printers, this printer from Epson offers great features at low cost. It retails around Rs.2800/- and the wholesale price at Rs.2400/-.
It is a USB port printer; hence it cannot be installed on very old Computers (without Usb port). Before buying this printer please check whether you have USB port on the Computer. Installation was smooth and didn?t give any problems. I have found that the installation on AMD machines can be tricky sometimes.
One of my friends tried to install a cannon Inkjet printer (USB) on an AMD machine with windows Me. The vender insisted that it could not be done on WinMe as the driver software does not support winMe. After a days trial I found one of the jumper setting on the motherboard was not correctly set.
This was corrected and it got installed. I have written this only to show that due to ignorance of the vendors customers are put to great hardships of changing the operating systems, which requires formatting of the hard drives and re-installing all the software that they use, this could be dangerous sometimes.
Coming back to C45, it offers some special features such as photo printing with two settings (normal and top-quality). Which means you can actually print photos of your near and dear ones at home. The advanced settings are great. You can control the printing at greater level. But this is recommended for those who know what they are doing. You may experiment with it. But for most users the ordinary settings itself is simple and easy to understand.
Another feature, which even the Hewlett does not offer, is the reduction of the printing size. It allows the user to adjust the printing to the size of the paper. Suppose you have a document which is set for normal 10X12 paper (normal dot-matrix paper) and want to print on an A4 size paper.
Normally you will have change the setting of the paper size, which in turn will upset the page layout on the document. Imagine changing the layout for a 25 or above page document. This could be a pain in neck, as you will have to change it back manually if you want print on a dot matrix again.
With Epson you can simply select the Page Layout, select Reduce/Enlarge Document and select the paper size. The printer shall automatically adjust printing to the size of the paper. This is like reducing or enlarging while taking a Xerox.
I have used Inkjet?s from Hewlett and it does not offer this feature, at-least on low cost (home use) printers. One last thing even though it looks like as breadbox, the printing is reasonably fast and less noisy. The ink cartridge is also cheap compared to Hp. Black ink sells around Rs 450/ and color Rs 750/- (Hewlett ? RS 1200/- and 1800/-). I have not checked how many prints one can get out of a refill, but already printed about 100 pages mostly black. Still 50% of black is reaming.
Cheap refill of the ink is not recommended as it may damage the printer head due to low quality of ink. The Epson ink uses a special quick dry technology, which means you don?t have to wait till the ink dries on the paper (it does not smear like hp). I hope this review might be useful to those who want to buy an inkjet printer.
Printers from Lexmark and Cannon are also available in the market, but I have found Epson to be rich with features that one can actually use at reasonable cost.
