Tuesday, 28 April 2015

Review: Epson L850


Epson L850
Price: Rs 27,000


Epson has been in the field of printers and MFDs for several years and the company has been gracious enough to send across its newest kid on the photo-printing block – L850 professional/home photo printer. The L850 is priced a little over mid-range, and this one being a photo MFD, comes with six ink tanks, which can be independently refilled. It also has some features such as memory card slots, USB, and CD/DVD label printing. The Epson L850 is targeted at photo enthusiasts and home. I am going to put it through the test routine to find out how well it performs.



Bundle
  • One set of six 70 ml ink bottles (Bk, C, M, Y, LC, LM)
  • CD/DVD label printing tray
  • USB data cable
  • Power cable
  • Quick Start Guide
  • Basic Operation Guide
  • Warranty Card
  • Driver and software CD

All the necessary cables have been provided and you will not need to purchase anything separately. An OCR software was not provided with this Photo MFD.

Features

In technical terms, the Epson L850 is a colour inkjet multifunction printer. It comes with an all-black plastic body. It has a glossy piano-black finish that quickly catches fingerprints and dust becomes easily visible on it. Thankfully, the top surface has a matte finish with a beautiful dotted pattern, so it is not as much of a fingerprint magnet. The overall build seems good. It looks large and is pretty much heavy at 9.1 kg, so moving it around is difficult once placed. With a height of 19.6 cm, it has a considerable footprint of 54.2 cm (width) x 38.6 cm (depth).

It features piezoelectric printing technology with 6 ink tanks for economy and better colour reproduction. It is therefore expected to be a good option for photo printing. The ink tanks are side loaded on a removable compartment and are connected to the printing head via tubes. The advantage with this design is that you need to refill an ink tank only when empty, rather than having to replace all as in the case of multi-ink cartridges. Also, it is more convenient to refill the ink tanks as they are present outside the body of the printer rather than within the bay where the printing heads are situated. One bad design aspect I could point out is that the removable compartment housing the ink tanks attaches very loosely to the printer body and the arrangement can be termed flimsy at best when compared to the construction of the printer itself.



The printing head has 90 nozzles per ink tank, yielding an astoundingly high printing resolution of 5760 x 1440 DPI. This should produce some really crisp results.


This MFD features an openable flap with a drawer-like input tray at the back of the unit and can accept a maximum of 100 sheets of A4 paper or 20 sheets of photo paper. A sliding paper guide allows you to adjust the input tray size. It is surprising to see that while there is a marker to indicate the position of this slider for CD/DVD printing, Epson has not provided any marking for 4x6 photos, even though this device has been touted to be for photo enthusiasts.


Paper is accepted face up and leading edge inside, while printed paper is ejected face up and leading edge out on the front retractable output tray, which is also an openable flap below the control panel.


A memory card slot is situated at the front centre of the device and it can read many memory card formats. Just the left of the memory slot, you can see the PictBridge/USB port for direct printing from a compatible camera or mobile phone. This can also read from USB drives as long as they have FAT32 file system.

The touch control panel aided by a 6.9 cm colour swivel LCD screen, provides fairly extensive controls of the device’s capabilities. The only hardware button over here is the power push button. There are no separate buttons for colour and black copy, so you need to select this in the UI and obtain a copy using the single copy button. This can be a bit inconvenient as compared to having two separate buttons for the purpose.

You can also access the memory card and special print functions here. Images on the card can be viewed in a slide show and you can even print an index sheet.

The Reprint/Restore function is a nifty one, letting you scan an old photograph and restore the original colours (or at least try to do so) before reprinting. Although the UI is very much still the same as was in 7 years old Epson models such as the TX700W, it is pretty slick and easy to use.



The control panel is hinged at one end and can be swivelled and locked into a position that lets you place it at a comfortable viewing angle by pressing a button present at the right. Therefore, you can view and use the control panel easily even if you are sitting on a chair and the MFD is placed on the floor.

The scanner is of flatbed type and can copy up to A4 size pages. It boasts of a hardware scanning resolution of 1200 DPI (horizontal) x 2400 DPI (vertical). Needless to say, the MFD can be used to copy without connecting to a PC. You can get up to 99 copies (colour or mono) and can reduce or enlarge them from 25% to 400%. Unlike many other MFDs, you do not have a dedicated Scan button, so you cannot scan to a file, email or image on the hard drive at just the press of a button.

The L850 supports only USB connection and there is no support for any wireless protocol such as W-Fi or Bluetooth, which is a surprise in this price segment, especially with the abundance of wireless devices. The USB port is present inside the body and is accessible on opening the device like a car bonnet. Once plugged, the cable can be channelled along a canal and exits outside from the back. A good thing about this design is that the USB cable cannot be accidentally pulled and unplugged.

The power cable plugs into the back at an awkward angle and unlike the USB cable, it plugs only halfway within the plug hole and I wouldn’t be surprised if it gets pulled out accidentally.

Drivers and software

The driver allows you to customize the quality settings as well as choose the paper size and type. You can print on both sides (manual) or even in the reverse order. You can also view the ink levels in individual cartridges. There are a few options such as PhotoEnhance to improve the print quality of photographs. There is even a setting to fix Red-Eye before printing a photo. Color Correction options let you tweak these settings even more by letting you vary the levels of individual inks.





Maintenance options let you do things like monitoring the status of the printer and cartridges, nozzle check, head cleaning, and print head alignment.

Software
The L850 comes with a few software as mentioned below.

Epson Easy Photo Print:
This software lets you lay out and print digital images on various types of paper with various adjustments and enhancements.


Epson Print CD:
Creating and printing your own CD/DVD label is made a lot easier by the Epson Print CD software.


Epson Event Manager:
You can assign any of the scanner buttons to open a scanning program using this software. This attempts to make amends to the fact that Epson has not provided a dedicated Scan button on the device’s control panel. You can also save frequently used scan settings, thus making scanning a lot easier and faster.


Epson Scan:
This software lets you control all the aspects of scanning. You can use this as a standalone scanning program or use it with another TWAIN-compliant scanning program.



Performance

Installing the drivers was very easy and straightforward. This MFD enters the ready state in a little over 30 seconds, which is quite some time.

I put the MFD through a variety of tests to test its printer as well as scanner components. I used the rear input tray to feed paper to this MFD. I didn't use the CD/DVD printing tray.

Font size printing test: I printed a page containing all the letters in font sizes ranging from large to very small. Standard quality was selected. The print quality at all font sizes is pretty good.

Text print speed: I printed a page of black text in draft and normal quality to find the speed as well as quality of the print. The first page took 7.8 seconds in draft mode and 20.2 seconds in standard. The first minute printing speed in the draft mode is 15.91 ppm, and it later reaches a maximum of 17.14, which is very fast. In the standard mode, the ppm in the first minute was found to be 3.43 and reaches 3.66 later, which is slower than most other printers. Print quality is good in the standard quality, but it is a lot fainter and barely usable in the draft quality mode.

Presentation document speed: This consisted of a page of multi-coloured graphs, text, charts, patterns, and photos. The first print took just 8.9 seconds in draft mode, while it took 24.4 seconds at standard quality. The printing speed in the draft mode was 15.60 ppm in the first minute, and it reached 17.14 thereafter. In the standard mode, these were 2.92 and 3.24 ppm respectively. The draft prints are a lot fainter again, but can be considered usable. The standard quality prints look much better.

Photo print: This was the test I was waiting for with high hopes and I would like to tell you that this device exceeded my expectations by leaps and bounds. The A4-size photo took 4 minutes 39 seconds to print, which is not a bad photo printing speed. The image quality was simply superb, with every fine detail reproduced perfectly. The highlight of the photo prints was that the blacks looked really black and the other colours were reproduced very well. The prints do not have any banding in colours or grayscale.

The scanner test: The scanner performance was found to be decent. It captures all the fine details very well but shifts the colours to a cooler temperature. The preview scan took just 11.2 seconds for the first page and it was 11 for consecutive scans thus yielding an impressive scan rate of 5.45 ppm. Monochrome scan of an A4 page at 200 dpi took just 12.5 seconds, while a colour scan at 600 dpi took an expectedly longer 1 minutes 41 seconds.

The copier test: The copier test tries to find how well the printer and scanner components work in tandem. Black copies took 19.6 seconds for the first copy, while the consecutive copies took 17 seconds. The ppm was 3.38 in the first minute, and it reached 3.53 later.

Colour copies took 26.8 seconds for the first copy, while the consecutive copies took 18.7 seconds. The ppm was 2.78 in the first minute, and it reached 3.21 later. Thus, this device is slow as a copier in mono as well as colour modes. Regardless of the speed, the copy quality is great in colour as well as monochrome. If I had this printer at home, I wouldn't want to go downstairs to get a photocopy, ever!

The printer shakes quite a bit while printing in the draft mode and even then the draft quality is mostly unusable. It was also noticed that you cannot print and scan at the same time.

Power Consumption

The power consumption in standby mode was found to be a steady 5 W, which increased to 6 W while scanning, 12 W while printing, and peaked at 14 W while copying. Needless to say, this is nothing compared to even an entry-level laser printer.

My Verdict

The Epson L850 is a very good performer and is very suitable for use for photo enthusiasts as well as home users (if they don’t mind spending the extra bucks). The overall print quality is quite good in normal and best quality. The photo quality is excellent with fine details and good colour reproduction. You also have the option to print directly to CD/DVD faces as well. It is quite silly to leave out wireless connectivity altogether as Wi-Fi has become ubiquitous.

It uses six separate ink tanks and is therefore more economical as they can be individually refilled and produce better prints due to control over six different colours. The cost of printing is economical as well, at least on paper. The cost of each 70 ml ink bottle is around Rs 600. Each cartridge can produce 1800 prints. Thus, if we consider that the printer uses all the cartridges together and prints 1800 pages before all the cartridges are expended, the cost per page comes to only Rs 2, which is not bad for a colour print. If you consider only black prints, the cost per page drops to 1/6th of that value to just 33 paise!

Epson provides two toll-free numbers – one for service and one for ordering ink bottles to be conveniently delivered to your doorstep. It comes with a 1-year warranty. Priced at Rs.27,000, this is a quite expensive out of reach of most home users, but I will still recommend it for photo enthusiasts due to its speed, economy, and excellent photo printing.


Pros: Excellent photo print quality and speed, Easy to use swivel control panel with colour LCD and slick touch controls, Six independent refillable ink tanks, Economical printing cost.

Cons: Expensive, Bulky and heavy, No dedicated “Scan” button, No wireless connectivity at its high price-point.


Features: 3.5/5
Performance: 4/5
Ease of use: 4/5
Economy of printing: 4.5/5
Value for money: 2/5

Overall Rating: 3/5

19 comments:

  1. The label for cd printing is not meant for the feeder. instead its for the scanner unit. this is applicable when photocopying cd covers. if you open the scanner unit you will see even more markings for different paper sizes. epson designed this printer such that the maximum paper size is A4 so if one desires to print a smaller paper size will push the adjuster at the feeder to fit whichever paper size below A4 be it 4*6 or whichever

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    Contact No.:
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    USA: +1-209-813-2790
    Website: http://www.epson-contact.com/epson-scanner-driver/
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