Tech News on G4Printing pretty printsNovember 05, 2007By Adam Swimmer - G4 Canada |
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If you buy an all-in-one printer, one thing you can't expect to find is portability. Still, when I received the box for my loaner Epson Stylus Photo RX680, I was overtaken by its size. After ripping open the box, I realized it was about the same size as the Lexmark X7170 I bought a year or so back, which is also a behemoth. When I finished setting up the monster, it let out a fearless roar as it charged the ink of the six cartridges. The sound almost rivalled a motorcyclist barrelling down a suburban street. But unlike that biker who is most likely trying to compensate for something as he over revvs his motor, the RX680 lives up to the noise. The Epson printer, listed at $199.99 at the Epson store, can print documents and photos, make scans, photocopies and even print onto printable CDs and DVDs. You don't even need a computer for most of these functions. You can even print directly from a flash memory card Printing documents and photos The machine has two paper trays: One rear sheet feeder that feeds like most printers and one front paper cassette that lies flat underneath. By default, it uses the rear sheet feeder which can occasionally cause problems. Like most bubblejet printers, it only actually feeds from the one side so unless the stack of paper is placed precisely, it has a tendency to feed crooked. But it's not that big of a deal as you can always switch to the other tray. The document printing is what you would expect. Unless you're using a 9-pin dot matrix printer that fails to write the tails on the "y"s and "g"s, you're not going to have trouble with the printing of text. And the RX680 can do 40 pages a minute so you won't have to wait very long to find out if the drug-induced philosophy paper you just finished writing is even the least bit comprehensible. But what's really impressive are the photo quality images it can reproduce. The RX680 boasts it offers Ultra Hi-Definition prints. This is just marketing speak as last time I checked paper isn't HD-compliant. But it can print extremely high resolution images (5,760 x 1,440 optimized dpi). And unlike other photo printers I've had in the past, I didn't have to fiddle much with the settings to get the colour balance of the screen image to match the printout. The default configuration generally worked. And when I used photo paper, the images looked like they were developed in a darkroom. And that's just with the standard cartridges. There are high-capacity ones you can buy too.
Scanning and photocopying The flatbed scanner component has an optical resolution of 1,200 dpi which isn't phenomenal but considering most people are never going to need a printout that's a higher resolution than, say 600 dpi, it should serve your needs. Similarly, for photocopies, it's not something you would want to use to make glossy photocopies of giant photo-heavy posters, especially since the copying function can't handle anything larger than letter-size paper. But for the most part even photos look okay. You just might need to mess around ab bit with the settings to keep it from looking faded. Unfortunately, the printer doesn't ship with any optical character recognition software which can distill the words from the scanned page. So although you can scan something as a PDF, it essentially treats it as a photograph. And it's hard to find a good, free one online. Of course, there are trial versions of OCR software you can download. Printing onto digital media By far one of the coolest features is being able to print directly onto a CD or DVD. Of course, you need to buy special printable discs but the final result is far more impressive looking than printing on labels (which are a hassle to stick on) and LightScribe burners which etch single-colour images onto its own type of special disc and looks like crap. Here, you can print full colour images and because the discs are small the photos don't need to very high-res. It comes with pretty easy to follow software. The ink sticks to the discs quite well. I mean, I'm sure if I dropped one in the toilet, or perhaps even just licked it, the colours would run, but it doesn't smudge. My only real complaint is that the RX680 doesn't come with a built-in fax so you'd need a fax modem to send any of the documents or photos you've scanned. There's a good chance you wouldn't have as there's far less people with dial-up connections nowadays. I guess there are online virtual fax options, but they can get to be pretty expensive. Still, the multifunction printer is a solid buy. Stylus Photo RX680 All-in-One printer
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The realistic look of these photographs is probably helped by the two extra cartridges. Instead of just the standard cyan, magenta, yellow and black, there are lighter versions of the cyan and magenta. Of course, more cartridges means more replacements. Although the standard ones retail for around $18 each, it gets annoying if you're constantly running to the store to replace an empty cartridge. Especially, if it's not actually out of ink. The Epson cartridges have memory chips that keep track of how many pages you've printed and will eventually decides it has printed enough sheets and switches to empty,
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G4 Canada (formerly TechTV Canada) launched in September 2001. G4 is the one and only television station that is plugged into every dimension of games, gear, gadgets and gigabytes. Owned Rogers Media Inc., the channel airs more than 24 original series. G4 is available on digital cable and satellite. For more information, see www.g4tv.ca.