Epson all-in-one reviews

So school me a bit here. This uses the toner cartridge thing like at work as opposed to colored ink cartidge printers that run out, fail, etc? I've bought endless ink jet wireless printers and they all eventually suck at printing even with brand new cartridges that are expensive as hell. Even with generic brand replacements.

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I read that the XL cartridges were good for 1100 pages. Should I actually expect that?

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Maybe, MAYBE, if you were printing plain text pages, and printing them all in a span of about a week. But in reality, ink nozzles dry up and the printer is going to do some self-cleaning in the interim to prevent this. The cleaning takes a good bit of ink. Usually, the page yields are based on 5% ink coverage per page. Photo printing is an ink guzzler. Even a tiny photo uses multiple layers of a generous amount of ink.

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Reliability?
Any software or connectivity problems?

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Epson printers are good. Quality will be great for your use, whether it's photos or text. Better would be a laser printer, but a decent color one will set you back a few hundred. An alternative would be to get a cheap black and white laser for your reports (high yield, and the sharpest quality), and a cheap ink-guzzler for the times you may want to print photos. But that's a lot of equipment and consumables, so it's not ideal.

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How are they on ink consumption?

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Well, when you consider that inkjet printers are commonly sold at a loss and that the business model relies almost exclusively on selling ink cartridges and other consumables, I would imagine it is going to try to consume ink as sneakily as possible, usually it's through the auto-cleaning cycles in its downtime.

There are plenty of remanufactured cartridges floating around that work just as well, so you can save money there. A lot of them have poor reviews, but remember that Amazon is a haven for shills, and these generic cartridges are a significant threat to the revenue stream of printer companies.

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Do I have to install all kinds of Epson programs, or can I just get the drivers and be done?

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Best case scenario, your OS recognizes the printer when it's on the network and won't even require drivers, but odds are you will need to install drivers. The driver CD is going to include several utilities that you may or may not want, such as a scanner and fax utility, a direct link to order supplies, interactive user manual, auto-updater for new driver releases, etc. Maybe some useless photo manager as well.

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Do they stop printing and say that the ink is low when it actually isn't?

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It will warn you fairly accurately that ink is low. If you are wondering if you'll be able to, for example, print in black when the cyan runs out, the answer is a hilarious no.

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Quality of their technical support and warranty?

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For a home printer, I wouldn't expect much from any company.

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Also, when I want to scan something, can I just go to Windows fax/scan and use that, or would I have to go through the whole PITA process on the display?

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You'll be able to do it from you computer, either with Windows native software or the Fax/Scan utility that comes with the printer. You should also be able to set up a network folder in which you can tell the printer to store scans.

I have an Epson XP 810.

It's an all in one and I love it. You can scan from any of the choices you mentioned, also from the touch screen on front of the Epson.
There are 2 blacks. You can get an xl for the regular black. There is also a photo black in there which explains itself.
So you have black, blue, red, yellow, and photo black.

Prints great pictures!

Also has capability of being totally wireless thru WiFi. Also your devices in the house on your WiFi network can print to it wirelessly.

It's perfect for me and my family...wife and 3kids

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My Epson will not scan if it is out of ink..It is essentially a brick, until you refill it

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i'm biting my tongue

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Not sure if this has been mentioned BUT...My Epson will not scan if it is out of ink..It is essentially a brick, until you refill it

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I bet my HP would behave the same way, but I've never had to face that problem. I always keep it well fed so as not to anger it.

Take this for what it's worth, but I just trashed a 1.5 year old Epson all-in-one because it would not longer spit out any ink. Absolutely atrocious. As someone else mentioned, not being able to print also rendered the scanner completely useless. Tell me why that is?

I replaced with and HP color laser printer. It doesn't do photos as well or have the scanner, but it's much less of a hassle.

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. It doesn't do photos as well or have the scanner, but it's much less of a hassle.

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Funny..you feel you have what you wanted?

I already picked it up. Only thing I wish it came with is a cord to hardwire it to the computer.

The last few printers I've purchased have cost less than the ink it takes to replace the spent cartridges. What a racket!