Dan Littman

Epson Stylus Photo 820

Epson's Stylus Photo 820 is a six-ink photo printer priced at $99--that's a deal. (The six-ink-design, common on high-end photo printers, includes light shades of cyan and magenta in addition to the standard cyan, magenta, yellow, and black.) And you can see the benefits of the six inks on glossy paper, where the Stylus Photo 820 renders highly detailed, rich, and realistic-looking photographs. Epson packs the 820 with clear, logical printed documentation and a great on-screen manual containing a batch of how-to movies.
It didn't surprise us that the Stylus Photo 820 printed slightly grayish text with rough edges--after all, Epson designed this printer for photos, not text. But we were disappointed by its grainy gray-scale images and foggy looking color graphics. Printing on ink jet paper didn't improve the quality of text or gray scales much. We found Epson's feature-laden driver confusing. For example, on its main tab the PhotoEnhance pop-up menu lets you set an image's color to make people or nature look more realistic or to appear in soft focus; elsewhere in the driver, a similarly named feature called PhotoEnhance4 lets you choose tone and texture settings. Like most photo printers, the 820 can hit you hard with ink costs: Based on Epson's estimated yields, black text should cost 7.3 cents a page and light-duty color graphics 17.3 cents, compared to the average of 4.4 cents and 12.7 cents.
Graphics print out fairly quickly, at 1.3 pages per minute, but text prints at just 1.9 ppm, about a third of the average print speed of ink jets on PC World's Top 10 chart. Epson provides two good software packages with the Stylus Photo 820: ArcSoft's PhotoImpression photo editor, and Epson's own Film Factory software, which lets you store, manage, and lightly edit your digital images.
The Stylus Photo 820's low purchase price and attractive glossy photos gear it to people who've just discovered digital cameras, but it's not appropriate for letter writers.

Buying Information

Epson Stylus Photo 820 Rated 12 ppm black text, ink jet, 2880-by-720-dpi maximum resolution, 100 sheets input, 30 output. $ 99 Rated 12 ppm black text, ink jet, 2880-by-720-dpi maximum resolution, 100 sheets input, 30 output. http://www.epson.com 800/463-7766