Epson Stylus Color 680
Price: AU$349
Distributor: Epson Australia
Ph: 02 9903 9000; Fax: 02 9903 9177
www.epson.com.au
Editors' Choice
We found ourselves with mixed emotions when we first unpacked Epson's new Stylus 680. On the one hand, we wanted to pat the engineers on the back for breaking the mould and trying to design a more interesting looking printer.On the other hand, some of us wanted to send the engineers back to design school (or at least reduce their medication). The 680 is certainly curvaceous, and the flexible, translucent front paper tray that literally folds back and clips to two bright chrome knobs on the top of the printer is nothing short of daring.
Both the Epson printers provided to the Lab were pre-production units with no -tree"-based documentation, and initially no drivers either. Luckily the drivers and, for the 680 at least, spare ink cartridges to perform life tests arrived in time for testing. We also noticed that the 680's case, which appears to be clipped together much the same as the other printers, had a nasty habit of unclipping and threatening to fall apart. We are pretty certain this -feature" will not be present on the production units; otherwise, the unit was quite robust.
It should be noted that the Epson cartridges cannot be removed and replaced on a whim. When first installed in the printer the cartridges undergo a pneumatic -charging" operation and if removed before empty they apparently become unusable. The printer does keep track of ink levels and amongst the controls on the front panel is a dual function cartridge replacement/print head clean button. This control will move the cartridges from their docked position if either the black or colour ink has run out, otherwise it will initiate a printhead clean cycle. Other controls include the power switch and form feed button, additional status indicators include paper out and power/data LEDs. All the Epson printers feature internal AC power adaptors that take standard -PC" style power cables. I/O runs to the now standard parallel and USB ports.
Epson claims a pretty phenomenal 2880dpi horizontal resolution with a more common 720dpi vertical resolution from both the 680 and 880 printers. Although the printer drivers only offer resolutions up to 1440dpi it may well be that Epson is claiming that the ink drop size can be reduced to the size of a -2880dpi" droplet. To Epson's credit there is no need to swap ink cartridges when you swap print jobs.
Cartridge life was pretty good with 420 pages output at 5 percent black coverage and 313 pages at 15 percent colour coverage. Taking the cost of the cartridges into account this breaks down to 14 cents per black page and 16 cents per colour page.
Epson has developed inks that are jack-of-all-trades and although they do appear more pale than some of the competition on plain paper (only slightly), they are just as vivid and saturated on high-quality inkjet paper. And, more to the point, the four ink colours manage to capture all the subtle colour variations of the many of the six colour printers we looked at. Another interesting difference between the Epson printers and other vendors is that the print heads are fixed, the user does not remove or replace them and we have witnessed many Epson inkjet printers plug away year after year without wearing out the print heads. Of course, if something does go wrong out of warranty you are possibly going to be up for a bit of money to replace the heads.
The automatic document feeder (ADF) holds up to 100 sheets of paper and, according to the on-line documentation provided with the printer, up to 90gsm paper can be fed by the ADF.
Peak throughput was very good, well up on the 660 we previously tested at around 4.2ppm. Initially we were shocked at how slow the 680 was producing the complex Word document at 720dpi; it took well over 10 minutes, which works out to 0.4ppm. We then tried a different approach and simply selected the -medium" quality level from the driver's quality slide bar (without resorting to using the advanced controls to select 720dpi). This actually equated to Epson's high-quality 360dpi mode and performance improved greatlyâ€"throughput climbed to 1.53ppm. We decided to utilise this setting as there was very little difference in quality between the two settings and it was in fact superior to quite a few of the other printers running at the higher resolutions. Character formation was quite good and colour and black area fills on plain paper were very even but slightly pale; there is an improvement in the density of black for example at the higher resolution setting but it is minor and certainly not worth four times the wait.
We certainly could not complain about pale colours when using inkjet paper, however; the colours were stunning, perhaps just the tiniest bit too saturated but otherwise colour fidelity was spot on. Detail was also excellent with very fine dither patterns, in fact the 680's photo output quality was so good that only two printers were superior, the Epson 880 and the Canon 8200, both far more expensive.
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Thats really good printer,These would be useful in the work place who are using printers.Like in the office. This may be a big help to make their work easier. Thanks for sharing this information. Have a good to all of you.
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