Epson Artisan 800

Pros: great print quality (due to 6 dye ink cartridges)
responsive scanning
cd printing
fully wireless

Cons: potentially flimsy paper tray
difficult wireless installation

Summary: Let me start by saying I own a LOT of tech gear and am usually an early adopter, but this is the only CNET review I've ever bothered to write despite everything I could write about. That ought to tell you something about this printer.

Despite being popular for years, I have avoided owning an all-in-one machine. I was afraid that if my scanner broke then my printer would be useless and vice versa. All-in-ones have come a long way, though. I figured it was finally safe to take the plunge.

I had some specific requirements when it came to choosing a printer. It had to be wifi compatible. It had to have excellent photo print capabilities. Lastly (and not quite as important), having a scanner would be a major perk. Despite those seemingly simple requirements, there are really only a few printers on the market that fit the bill that I found- the Epson Artisan series and Canon MP980. I decided the MP980 was too bulky and the Artisan 700 didn't have the feeder for the scanner or as high of scanning capabilities. I'm glad I got the Artisan 800.

Installation was admittedly tricky, but I'm fairly familiar with hardware so I worked my way through it. I ended up not really following the instructions. One of the on-screen prompts was blatantly wrong (at least for me) so I finished it on my own. It took a while, but everything works flawlessly - printing, scanning, and even accessing the card readers on the front of the printer via the wireless network.

The scanner is pretty responsive. I haven't challenged it too much yet, but I'll be loading a lot of my older photos to sync with my current digital collection. This scanner is proving to be more invaluable than I realized. As for quality, it has a higher optical resolution than most other all-in-ones. That's a big deal for people who are not willing to sacrifice.

As for printing, I've been fairly impressed so far. I'm really picky about color accuracy from screen to paper so I did have to burn through a few sheets of photo paper to get the results I wanted. I would think this is to be expected with all printers, though. I like that you can load both plain paper and photo paper in at once and switch between the trays on the fly. It would bother me if I had to manually switch all the time so that's a big deal for me. I also like the cd printing function. I have yet to use it, but I appreciate that its there. I already had a personal B&W laser printer that I've been using, but this new Artisan 800 might replace it completely.

As for copying, the first document seemed to take quite a while. I'm not exactly sure why. All subsequent copies have been way faster, though. Most of what I'll be copying will be receipts or text documents so I'm not particularly concerned with color rendition. As such, I was mostly copying B&W and can't comment on color copies.

A lot of people seem to complain about the paper tray. I admit that it does feel flimsy, but it spends 99.9% of its time completely inserted inside the printer so it would be really hard to break. Maybe it would get damaged in an office setting where employees are slamming things around, but for home use I don't foresee any problems. And let's be honest, this is a photo printer at heart. It's built for home use. Some people have also complained about the guides on the paper tray being confusing. I don't see where they get that. Even if it is troublesome, though, you pretty much just set it once and forget about it for the rest of the time you own the printer.

Certainly the most difficult part for me was the installation. I'm not going to fault the printer, though. It's complicated equipment. It does a lot of things. There are plenty of things to potentially go wrong. If I were hooking it up via USB I expect I would not have had any trouble. However, wifi was another matter. Also, my wifi router is under the couch so I couldn't plug the printer straight into it to set it up as the manual suggests. It did take me 2 tries, but I finally got it. For what it's worth, I never needed to call tech support. It might be a good idea to borrow a techie friend to install it for you, though.

I hate to knock the wifi, though, since its one of the printer's best features. Virtually anything that this printer can do can be done wirelessly. It's completely transparent to the user. Even the card slots on the front of the printer can be accessed wirelessly as network drives. Plus you can punch the IP address into the web browser of your choice and you have a full-fledged web configuration interface. Now that's pretty sweet.