Epson Stylus Photo RX680 All-In-One Printer
The Epson RX680 All-In-One Printer is a very nice printer and scanner that has plenty of features for the home, home office, office and business.
Ease of Use, Performance: 18/25, Look & Feel: 23/25,
Features 25/25, How much I enjoy 22/25
Total: 88/100
The Epson Stylus Photo RX680 is a new breed of All-In-One printer and scanner that does not have the old technology of Fax, personally I have no idea why they use it anymore. The Epson RX680 does a great job with a wide variety of printing functions and even handles things like editing pictures and printing directly from memory cards.
There are a host of features and specifications but I will only touch on some of the main ones like a full 2 sided printing function and two paper trays for two kinds of paper loaded at once. The RX680 handles pages from 4 x 6 inch up to the regular 8.5 x 14 legal size with all kinds of envelope and business sizes in between. You can also print CD’s and DVD’s with the available CD/DVD tray directly on printable disc media.
The RX680 uses separate ink cartridges for each color so you have a total of six ink cartridges; black, yellow, two blue tones and two red tones. I have had printers for a few years now that use these separate color inks and it is very nice on the pocket book to have them separate. Having the separate ink cartridges means less wasted ink when one color is out and having to purchase a new cartridge like those all in one cartridges and using a wide variety of colors means better images and colors.
We all know that ink is the costly part of a printer, buying a set of ink cartridges usually costs about half the price of the printer or more. The ink cartridges for this printer would cost about $85 depending on where you go and you can find ones cheaper but probably not by much. I will not get into the fact that you void the manufacturer’s warranty if you use cartridges that are not Epson brand.
Setting up and installing drivers was fairly easy but you do have to search out all those hold down pieces of tape and use the guide to get them all. Installing drivers is relatively quick, much faster than HP’s install for a printer; Hewlett Packard installs a wide variety of printers when you load the drivers for your one printer which is sometimes annoying. Getting to the point of actually using the printer only took about ten minutes from box to test page in my hot little hands.
Installing or replacing the ink cartridges is easy and only takes a minute or two which is nice but the prepping of the ink cartridges will take a bit. There are actually quite a few things like preparing the ink or preparing the machine for printing that does take a minute or more at times. The speed is not all that great as it can take a minute or two for the RX680 to start printing like its setting things up internally. This is not considered into their print times as it took longer for some printing jobs than others for the same picture but in all it does not take too long a time to print anything I tried.
I ran this machine through its paces and tried all kinds of different printing like really high resolution pictures and just the plain emails and internet web pages and was quite pleased with the results, as long as I remembered the correct side on the front tray. When you place the paper in the front tray it turns the paper over inside so you have to remember to place the print side down in the tray.