Review: Epson Expression Photo XP-850 Small-in-One Printer

January 24, 2013

The Epson Expression Photo XP-850 Small-in-One Printer’s talents may lean toward photos, but along with the superior image quality, it’s also a full-featured, fairly fast color inkjet multifunction (MFP) with automatic duplex printing and scanning. Its $300 price (as of 01/22/2013) is steep, but it includes other premium features, like CD/DVD printing. The Expression Photo XP-850 is generally a joy to use. Setup is easy, and the touchscreen and contextually lit buttons, plus nicely thought-out menus, make operation simple. The software is the current standard Epson bundle that includes the company's venerable Epson Scan, as well as Abbyy FineReader 9.5 Sprint for OCR chores. There's also mobile printing via e-mail and Wi-Fi. By ‘generally a joy’ we mean that one of these first days, Epson needs to fix a long-standing push-scan issue. This is at least our third printer from the company that has required either tweaking the Windows firewall, or waiting for a number of minutes, before PCs on the network will show up as scan destinations. No other vendor's printers suffer this issue. Paper and media handling are top-notch for small volumes. Duplex printing is automatic, and augmenting the 100-sheet main paper cassette and 20-sheet photo cassette is a rear, single-sheet vertical feed that allows straight-path (no bending) photo printing. The automatic document feeder (ADF) holds 30 sheets and supports automatic two-sided scanning. The scanning platen itself is letter/A4-sized, and the lid telescopes a small distance to accommodate magazine-thick media. Optical media may be on its way out for some, but on the bottom of the Expression Photo XP-850, you'll find a removable adapter for feeding printable CD or DVD media. The adapter inserts into a slot above the 50-sheet output tray. Before we quote speeds, note that upping the photo-printing setting from ‘Photo’ to ‘Best Photo’ slows output to a glacial pace, with little improvement in quality. At default settings, monochrome text and graphic pages print at an aggregate 7.1 pages per minute (ppm) on the PC and 6.8 ppm on the Mac—average times. Snapshot-sized (4-by-6-inch) photos print at above-average speeds of 4.6 ppm to plain paper and 1.6 ppm to glossy paper. A full-page color photo prints at about 0.4 ppm--a shade slower than average. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2026140/review-epson-expression-photo-xp-850-small-in-one-printer.html