Key Features Reviewed: Wireless Printing, Individual Ink Cartridges, Printing Directly from a Flash Drive or CD
The Epson Artisan 810 is an all-in-one, printer, copier, scanner, fax unit. Set up was a breeze, as was installation of the printer drivers on both PC and Apple laptops.
One of the big advantages of the Epson Artisan 810, as well as many other Epsons, is the fact that printer cartridges can be changed individually. No need to throw away a cartridge containing perfectly good ink in other colors just because one color has run out! You only need to change the color you are out of. Most printers have 4 inks: black, cyan, magenta and yellow. The Epson Artisan 810 has 6, the standard 4 plus light cyan and light magenta. The extra colors give more color definition to your images. Photos print with true to life colors on photo paper. There is no bleeding of colors even in dense images. Text is very sharp.
Even with my print quality always set at the highest “Best Picture” level the inks seem to last a long time, at least as long as other ink jet printers I have used. I have found the inks to be smudge and water resistant, no image or text has ever changed after I printed it. Epson says the inks are also scratch and fade resistant.
Another fabulous feature of the Epson Artisan 810 is remote wireless printing. Using my Wi-Fi network both laptops printed from anywhere in the house without a hitch, including sending the print job from the first floor to the printer on the second floor.
Two features took me a bit of a learning curve, 2-sided printing and red-eye correction. Two-sided printing from a computer is a multi-step process. From the Print command you have to select Properties, then Page Layout , then select Auto or Manual 2-sided printing. It would be great if Auto 2-sided printing could be selected in the original Print window. The current method can be frustrating if you are printing a series of documents that all need to be double-sided. Manual 2-sided printing prints one side and waits for you to feed the sheet back into the unit for the second side, so is not convenient with remote printing. It will however, allow a dense image to dry before being fed back through so the first side does not smear. When you select Auto 2-sided printing the printer asks if you would like to reduce the density of ink on the image to lessen the likelihood of smearing the ink on the first side. I have always declined to reduce the density, and have never had an image smear.
Red-eye correction can be addressed by selecting Print, then Properties, then Main, then Fix Red-Eye from a computer. After several attempts using this option I could not get the command to correct red-eye in pictures that were printed from either the PC or Apple laptop. What did work was to print the picture from a flash drive which was inserted directly into the USB port of the Epson Artisan 810. Red-eye correction was then selected from the panel on the printer and the picture printed with no red-eye.
Because of the Epson Artisan 810’s terrific wireless printing feature I am rarely in the room with the printer when I send a print job. When I have watched pages print I believe Epson’s approximately 9 pages per minute (ppm) estimate, for both black & white and color printing, is correct.
Copying using the Epson Artisan 810 is faster than printing, and the copied image is sharp. There is little if any visible bleeding around text on the copied page and the color of copied pictures is very good, very close though of course not exact to the original.
Printing directly from a flash drive is a convenient feature of the Epson Artisan 810. The printer automatically seeks pictures on your flash drive when it is inserted into the printer’s USB port. You can, however, backspace to the drive’s menu and print other types of files directly from the drive without using a computer. If you print pictures from a flash drive you can crop the image from the panel of the Epson Artisan 810. Just choose your paper size after cropping, or the crop will not take effect.
The Epson Artisan 810 scanned quickly and the images were accurate. Our Wi-Fi network did not allow the images to be sent back to either the PC or Apple laptop wirelessly, but the pictures could be saved to a flash drive using the printer’s USB port.
The Epson Artisan 810’s fax capability was not reviewed. I primarily use a cell phone for communication and did not have a land line convenient for testing.
SUMMARY
Pros: individual ink cartridges, wireless printing, intuitive control panel, great print quality
Cons: multi-step Auto 2-sided printing, red-eye correction only working from the printer panel and not remotely
I agree with everything in the review, plus the 810 prints onto Cd/DVD’s as it has a CD tray. This one one of my criteria for purchasing the unit.
Of course you must buy printable CD’s or DVD’s but they are about the same price. The CD/DVD printing is ‘good’ on the 810.
The other feature I use a lot is to scan directly back to my PC. You can even control the scans, with options, from the PC/Mac. This was wirelessly – so it can scan wireless (a correction to the article).
I have used the fax (under extreme pressure) and the fax works like a dream.
Excellent all-around unit.