The Epson Expression Photo XP-850 Small-in-One Printer’s skills might lean towards pictures, nevertheless together with the superior image standard, it’s additionally a full-featured, very quick color inkjet multifunction (MFP) with automatic duplex printing plus scanning. Its $ 300 cost (because of 01/22/2013) is steep, however, it involves additional premium qualities, like CD/DVD printing.

The Expression Photo XP-850 is usually a joy to employ. Setup is simple, as well as the touchscreen plus contextually lit buttons, and well thought-out selections, create surgery easy. The software is the active standard Epson bundle which involves the company’s venerable Epson Scan, and also Abbyy FineReader 9.5 Sprint for OCR tasks. There’s furthermore mobile printing through email plus Wi-Fi. By ‘generally a joy’ you mean which 1 of these initial days, Epson must fix a long-standing push-scan matter. This really is at minimum the 3rd printer within the organization which has needed either tweaking the Windows firewall, or waiting for a amount of minutes, before PCs found on the network may show up because scan destinations. No other vendor’s printers suffer this problem.

Paper plus media handling are top-notch for little volumes. Duplex printing is automatic, plus augmenting the 100-sheet key paper cassette plus 20-sheet picture cassette is a back, single-sheet vertical feed which enables straight-path (no bending) picture printing. The automatic document feeder (ADF) holds 20 sheets plus supports automatic two-sided scanning. The scanning platen itself is letter/A4-sized, as well as the lid telescopes a little distance to support magazine-thick media. Optical media can be about its method out for several, however found on the bottom of the Expression Photo XP-850, you will find a removable adapter for feeding printable CD or DVD media. The adapter inserts into a slot above the 50-sheet output tray.

Before you quote speeds, note which upping the photo-printing setting from ‘Photo’ to ‘Best Photo’ slows output to a glacial pace, with small improvement inside standard. At standard settings, monochrome text plus graphical pages print at an aggregate 7.1 pages per minute (ppm) found on the PC plus 6.8 ppm found on the Mac—average instances. Snapshot-sized (4-by-6-inch) pictures print at above-average speeds of four.6 ppm to plain paper plus 1.6 ppm to glossy paper. A full-page color photograph prints at regarding 0.4 ppm–a shade slower than average.

The Expression Photo XP-850 utilizes a six-ink program which adds light magenta plus light cyan to the normal cyan, magenta, yellow, plus black. While the individual ink fees are somewhat cheaper than average total, the expense potential is high whenever we have six inks inside play instead of 4. The standard-capacity $ 10.99/240-page black plus $ 10.99/360-page hues are four.6 cents per page plus 3 cents per page, per color, respectively. The high-capacity $ 19.99 black lasts for 500 pages as well as the $ 16.99 color cartridges, 740 pages, that exercise to 4 cents per page plus 2.3 cents per page per color.

Melissa RiofrioThe Epson Expression Photo XP-850′s inks are affordable. Because there are six of them, nevertheless, the page may end up costing a bit more inside the finish.

While we pay a lot for the ink, it’s worthwhile whenever we print images. The color palette is usually cool, however, the Expression XP-850′s glossy prints show especially good detail plus total color precision. Most consumers usually like what they see. Text printed about plain paper is sharp, however, the dye-based ink signifies which heavier fonts plus black regions tend more towards dark-gray. The weakest aspect of the Expression XP-850′s output is color images printed about plain paper, that look washed-out.

The Epson Expression Photo XP-850 might function perfectly because a photograph printer which can sometimes double because an workplace MFP. It’s at minimum 1 feature much better than the Canon Pixma MG8220 Wireless Inkjet Photo All-In-One, that lacks an ADF. The HP Photosmart 7520 e-All-in-One Printer is a similar plus worthy alternative with a lower price.