****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
Needed a printer that could do 11x17 or larger for proofs to replace an irritating HP, and looked around for a couple months at options. Photography people kept saying 'Epson' but I was more familiar with Canon or HP. So I was suspicious. I'm a suspicious kinda guy.Saw this on sale on Amazon, and figured for the price, I may as well give it a try.I am very impressed with this. They even have linux drivers! I'm a Unix/Linux guy, and hate having to boot up a windows or mac box to have to print anything. So this was great.The printer is a bit cantankerous to set up. Takes forever to warm up ink cartridges on install, took 3 firmware updates, and the paper trays are just... well... poorly thought out. But... I didn't get it to store paper. I got it to print.The print quality is an amazing upgrade for me. No banding, no oversaturation, no smudging or bleeding... With a lustre paper, the prints are indistinguishable from photo prints. Best of all, with the right monitor setup, the colors you see on the screen are the colors you get in the print.I have a high end setup. 30 bit color monitors and quadro video cards, so your mileage may vary. But if you have the right setup, you can get matched colors on prints without messing around and experimenting with tons of ICC profiles.Also I LOVE the true borderless printing. Best I have used.Some people complain about having to manually feed the 11x17 paper in, and yeah, that's a pain if you want to do a lot of prints at a time, but honestly, for the cost of ink... if I am going to be doing enough that becomes an issue, I am just gonna go to a real print shop. Seems silly to do a bulk run on a studio printer.Ink useage is reasonable compared to Canon or HP, which are just bloody ink hogs. I've done quite a few full color image prints and the ink levels are only down about 5%. The cartridges may seem pricey, but if you've been stuck with the horror of HP for the last few years, these are cheap in comparison.So, for proofs, references, or one off specialty printing, at the price, I am quite impressed.
