Epson Elevates the All-in One Printer

All-in-one printers have a bit of a reputation among, um, print enthusiasts. They tend to offer plenty of great features, and there is no denying that they save space over having separate scanners, copy machines, and printers. But the software is often patchy, and until recently, networking wasn’t all that great either. Worst, print quality often suffered, compared with their stand-alone, single-purpose brethren.

We’re happy to report that the Epson Artisan 710 Color Inkjet All-In-One Printer suffers from few of those problems, though it does have a few quirks- even printers are going artisinal these days! Networking is a breeze, thanks to both the typical built-in ethernet port but also the easy wi-fi. It can handle CD and DVD printing, even, and did so adeptly. The built-in memory card slot can be accessed from any computer on your network, just in case you don’t want to haul around your memory card readers (and it supports most any format, from SD, xD to MMC, along with Memory Stick and Compact Flash). And print were beautiful- photos came out with great colors, surprisingly vibrant, and pretty fast too- about 5-10 seconds each. Regular black and white text printed 15-30 pages per minute; their claim of 38 wasn’t far off, but we typically opt for higher-quality settings that slow things down a bit and made the range pretty broad.

On the downside, the software definitely isn’t perfect- all-in-one software is typically a bit of a pain, and we tried it on XP, Vista, and Windows 7 with varying minor issues on each. We would’ve preferred a touch screen- if you’re going to include a nice, bright LCD with nice-looking buttons, just make it a touch screen. Scanning was only so-so, with business cards being a particular problem. And the worst problem with inkjet printers is always the ink, and it’s sadly no better here: there are six different ink cartridges, and depending if you’re printing those high quality photos, you’ll definitely end up spending a fair bit on ink. Note that the printer will also run a cleaning cycle after it has been unused for a while, and that it can take a while (and use up some ink).

All in all, the Artisan 710 a great printer at $175, with a great feature set and a particular emphasis on photo quality and the nifty CD/DVD printing capability. It would make a great gift for the aspiring photographer or photo lover, or pretty much anyone who does a fair bit of color printing- make sure to buy them some extra ink though.