Epson Artisan 837 Color Inkjet Wireless All-In-One with Fax (C11CB20201)
Epson Artisan 837 Color Inkjet Wireless All-In-One with Fax (C11CB20201)
- Rated no1 in photo quality by consumers
- World’s Fastest 4×6 inch photo printer
- Fax 30page ADF and 7.8 inch touch panel
- Epson Connect to print from mobile devices
Inkjet Printer – Color – Ink-Jet – ISO print Speed: 1black: 9.6 ISO PPM 2COLOR:
List Price: $ 299.99
Price: $ 216.95
Best Printer/Copier/Scanner/Fax I’ve Owned, great with OSX 10.7 and Win7,
I just received my Epson Artisan 837 (with $3.99 Amazon Prime 1-day shipping) and installed it yesterday. The bottom line is that Epson has a winner, I made the right selection for me, and I highly recommend this product! The printer itself is beautiful, sleek, and not too large for my cabinet-top. The printing, copying, touch panel, optics, firmware, flawless setup process and level of automation were extremely well engineered. I was able to eliminate three other disjointed components plus a separate wireless print-server and all associated cables, power cords, etc with this multiple function component. We never needed a USB cable for anything-wireless worked perfectly, even for a firmware update.
I’d been researching multiple function printers for a few months and had settled on either the newly announced Canon PIXMA MG8220 or the newly announced Epson Artisan 837. Both have excellent features, specs, reviews and capabilities. I wanted to replace my standalone Epson scanner, standalone Brother black and white laser printer/fax/copier and my standalone HP D5360 color text/photo/direct to CD & DVD printer, all with a single multifunction printer. They both would enable me to do this, but what pushed me off the fence was the auto-document feeder, which the Canon doesn’t have.
Make sure you remove the blue tape used to secure the 837 during shipping. There’s even some tape you can’t see, such as in the paper tray. By the way, some reviewers criticize the paper trays on both the predecessor Epson Artisan 835 and Canon printers. Indeed, the plastic is thin, but no more flimsy than many of my other printers and I have no qualms that it’ll break unless I physically twist it.
Setup was amazingly simple, fast and automated, using the printer’s touch panel. It walked me through the process when I powered up, including connecting to my wireless network. I don’t broadcast my SSID so it let me input my Network name, then it proceeded to verify connectivity as “excellent”! It prompted me to install the ink cartridges and after about seven minutes had primed them and was ready to print.
Next, I installed the most current drivers for my OSX Lion Macbook from Epson’s support website. The first note on the installation guide says to not use the included CD if running Lion. I never had to connect my Macbook to the printer with a USB cable at all. Once Lion drivers were installed, I let it find my Artisan 837, I configured my options for printing (duplex) and provided my header info and configured my Macbook for faxing. Last, I printed a test page to confirm everything was completed–all was perfect. Then I inserted the CD and installed the Print CD app, User’s Guide, and ABBYY FineReader (everything except the drivers).
I installed the drivers and fax setup on my wife’s Windows 7 notebook using the CD. The Epson app scanned and found the Artisan 837 immediately, made the wireless connection, and proceeded to ask me if I wanted to automatically update the firmware (I did).
I’ve printed photos, text and graphics so far and the results are truly spectacular, as are print-outs from the copy function. The scans were fast and very sharp. I haven’t printed directly to a CD or DVD yet, nor have I used the fax (other than to test that the fax configuration is correct) but I’m confident both will be perfect as well, based on other reviews. If not, I’ll post an update.
Was this review helpful to you?
|One Outstanding Printer,
This is the best printer that I’ve ever owned. Period. Considering how many printers I’ve gone through, that’s saying a lot. Let’s go through the various pieces and I’ll show you why I like it so much….
Print Quality – It’s rather trite, but the number one job of a printer is to print. The print quality of the Artisan 837 is outstanding. Using decent quality paper, the output is sharp and clear. Small point type is very readable and fine lines are clearly defined. Normal single-sided printing is very fast. Two-sided printing is considerably slower, as the printer waits for the ink to dry before printing the second side.
Photo Printing – The Artisan 837 adds two more color cartridges to the standard cyan, magenta, yellow and black mix. By including a light cyan and light magenta cartridge, it’s possible to produce prints with subtle shades and smoother color gradation. More expensive, dedicated photo printers (e.g. Epson R1900 or R2880, Canon PRO9000MkII) add in still more ink colors and can produce larger prints, but this printer produces excellent prints for all but the most discerning user. There is one application where I wouldn’t recommend this printer – very high quality black and white photo printing. If you plan on producing high resolution B/W prints, you should look at the Epson R2880 or the Canon Pro9500MkII. Those units have light black and other cartridges designed specifically for that application. Outside that, though, prints from the Artisan 837 are truly stunning. Like all photo printers, the print quality depends on the quality of the original photo, the paper stock and the print speed. The advertised 10 second 4×6″ print speed is for premium glossy photo paper in draft mode, but even that produces a pretty good print.)
Paper Tray – If you’re tired of pulling the paper tray and adjusting the guides every time you want to print a photograph, the Artisan 837 has a solution – the paper tray simultaneously holds both photo and regular paper in two different sections. At my house, I’m keeping 4×6 photo paper loaded in the top section, while the bottom holds standard printer paper…the printer automatically selects the correct paper depending on what’s being printed. The downside of this arrangement is that the tray has a fairly small capacity, only holding 120 pages of normal 20lb paper.
CD/DVD Printing – I don’t use too many CDs and DVDs anymore, but when I did, I used a Black Sharpie marker to label my disks. (Except when I was feeling ambitious and had time to burn. Then I used LightScribe disks) No more. The Artisan 810 has an integrated tray to feed printable CD’s into the printer. Just about anything that you can think of – Illustrations, photos and/or text – can be directly printed onto the disk’s surface. Even if what you’re printing is just a list of file names, it’s better than writing them out by hand. One of the included software programs formats text and pictures to fit on the CD’s surface. It’s nothing fancy, but it works.
Scanning – Direct to PC or USB – Buttons on the touch screen display allow you to select the destination of a scanned document. The scanned image can be sent to any computer that has the Epson drivers installed. The file can be saved in .jpg or PDF format. OCR software (ABBYY FineReader) is included in the software package to convert scanned documents into editable text. Like most all-in-one units, the scanner only scans one side of the page.
Document Feeder – Swinging the feeder input tray closed also lifts the feeder’s output tray to make a smooth top…cosmetically it’s nice, but more importantly, it also reduces the chances of paperclips and other office debris falling inside. I’ve copied a 30 page document without a problem…the maximum thickness of the paper stack is spec’ed at 3mm, or roughly 1/8″
Faxing – It works. Outside of color faxing, which isn’t really new, there’s nothing too exciting here…punch in the number, hit the button and off it goes. You can store far more numbers than you’re likely to ever need in a speed dial directory. You can also assign numbers to various groups, so you can easily send the same fax to multiple locations.
Copier = Scanner + Printer – As I mentioned above, I’ve copied a 30 page document without a problem. Along with two-sided printing, you can also automatically copy both sides of a paper. With CD printing as one of the features, the Artisan also incorporated a CD/DVD copy mode. You put the original CD in the middle of the glass and hit the dedicated “Copy CD/DVD” button. The firmware is smart enough to correct minor centering issues.
Touch screen controls – Between the keypad, function select buttons, various setup and navigation buttons and everything else, most multi-function machines have a ton of buttons on their front panel. By using a touch panel that just displays the necessary buttons, the…
Read more
Was this review helpful to you?
|Nice functionality, easy setup but thirsty for ink,
While I like the high-end Epson printers, I’ve usually gone with HP when it comes to all-in-one systems. After using this Epson, my opinion has changed. This is a very well made device.
I was impressed right out of the box – Epson made a great effort to package the system so it can withstand the bruises inflicted by transit. That may seem like a minor issue, but it’s important to me as I can’t remember the last time I purchased electronics from a brick and mortar store. It’s nice to see that some manufacturers understand that their products are going to be shipped (usually without any other protection) and take steps to ensure that it gets to the customer in working order.
Build quality seems generally good, although the paper tray seems flimsy. That’s a tough call to make, however, since some plastics are engineered to be both light but also sturdy. Thus, no stars were deducted on that account. It does look quite nice – much better than the bland, drab putty-colored office machines.
Setup was straightforward. I was worried about wireless setup since my last wireless printer (an HP) took a couple of hours of the `try this/swear/try that/swear/try something else’ approach to installation. The Epson was quick and painless.
Photo print quality is excellent – much better than I expected at this price point. No, it won’t give a high end photo printers that cost five times as much a run for their money (especially in monochrome), but for general purpose snapshot printing, this is fantastic. Sharp, clear and fast. Really fast!
Faxing was also easy to set up and use. The paper feeder works very well for multi page feeding even with rumpled pages. The touch panel greatly aids in helping you figure out what to do without guessing or (perish the thought!) looking it up in the manual.
My only complaint is the ink. It’s not a great printer when it comes to black ink use – the cartridge is small and priced higher than other black inks when you compute the cost per ml. The printer will not function when one of the cartridges is empty.
This is not the best choice if you plan on using your all in one for a lot of B/W tasks (e.g., mainly for faxing and B/W copies). There are more economical choices out there. This is, however, an outstanding choice if you want to do a fair amount of color photo printing plus have the ability to make a copy or send/receive a fax all from the same machine, and have a painless time setting it up for either direct connect or wireless use. Highly recommend.
Was this review helpful to you?
|