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| Product: Stylus Color 440 printer |
Company: Epson |
| Web: www.epson.com |
Phone: 800-463-7766 |
| Platform: Win3.1/95/98/NT |
SRP: US$130
Street Price: US$105 |
Cred Rating: | Special Award: |
Because I'm German royalty [no, really! -Ed.], Webmeister GB thought I'd be the perfect reviewer of the Epson 440, the youngest in a long and noble lineage of ink jet printers. The Countess's computer chops are worth about as much as her
title (i.e., that and US$1.79 will get her a tall latte), yet she conjoined
the Epson and her eMachine with nary a misadventure.
There was one moment, toward the end of the installation, when the onscreen prompt contradicted the directions in the hard copy manual. The Countess trusts the old ways and followed the book's instruction. Some confusion ensued, raising the royal blood pressure, but finally, the proper window appeared and the Countess pressed on.
Apple's QuickTime movie program comes on the installation disc which raised expectations for something cinematic from the on-screen manual (the Countess just *loves* a good instructional video). There was nothing of the sort, but the disc does include a 169-page onscreen manual, intelligently organized, indexed, glossaried and cross-referenced. The print manual is also well laid out, in full color (a rarity). One nice feature is a troubleshooting section in the back with color pictures of various print problems (images marred by horizontal lines, blurry, smeared, etc.) and instructions on how to fix them. Epson's manuals and other documentation are a model of clarity and user-friendliness that other computer companies should emulate.
Software applications include the ubiquitous PhotoDeluxe 2.0 and Adobe Type Manager. The former boasts ludicrously of its ability to make digital "hand-tinted and old-fashioned works of art." American Greetings' CreataCard software lets you produce Hallmark-like "occasion cards." The interface to the program is even arranged like the cards are in the drugstore. So where is the condolences section for the digital generation? ("Sorry to hear about your IRQ conflicts" or "Sorry to hear your hard drive crashed and you lost your entire novel." )
The printer, an ink jet, comes with a few sheets of fancy photo paper to tease you with its four-color print quality. Such photo-quality printing takes 5-6 minutes to emerge, but the results are impressive. A 40-page black and white text document took about 15 minutes to print--and they were a *loud* 15 minutes. This thing is not pleasant to listen to. If you had the 440 cranking out printing all day long, you'd probably end up wearing earplugs (or going slowly loopy). Its high-pitched whirring and clanking would not be out of place on a David Lynch soundtrack.
The ink, the so-called quick-drying variety, still smears a bit on bond paper -- Kinko's cheapest-- but not enough for the Countess to spring for special parchment.
The printer is agreeably small: 17" wide, 23.7" deep, and 11.6" high with paper feed and output trays extended. It uses one 3-color and one black ink cartridge, and the resolution is crisp: 720 x 720 dots per inch in color. One very annoying oversight was that the the machine did not come with a printer cable. How much would this have cost them to throw in? Epson printers come with a one-year "Overnight Exchange warranty" and are ready, one is assured, for all circumstances millennial.
Epson gets the royal wax seal for creating an easy-to-use, versatile photo-quality printer that costs a pittance. Long live Epson!
- Virginia Vitzthum [7/19/99]
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