Review :Epson – Stylus C84
One of the main new features of Epson’s Stylus C84 is its bear of DURA rite inks and papers. This new Epson technology maintains the double advantages of water-resistance as the crow flies out of the printer and fade-resistance of up to 80 years. This is achieved using new pigmented color inks and we can verify that its water-resistance is attractive good.
The Stylus C84 is a rather large ink-jet printer with a conformist paper path. It takes up to 120 sheets of A4 paper from a near-vertical hopper at the rear and feeds it out to a fold-down, telescopic output tray at the front. Three control buttons on the printer’s top exterior provide for power, ink-tank maintenance and paper feed control.
Epson continues to use its piezo-electric print heads, which last for the lifetime of the printer. The head carrier takes four, clip-in ink tanks, which can be replaced separately to give better consumables economy, if you use the colours at different rates. The tanks cost around £9.50 for each of the colors and £19 for the standard black. A high-capacity black cartridge is also available. With DURAbrite paper currently costing about 40p per sheet, this gives a cost per page of around 8p for a 5 percent coverage standard black page and 59p for a 20 percent reporting full-colour one. These costs are on the high side, but should drop as DURAbrite paper becomes more widely obtainable.
The printer offers both similar and USB interfaces and the software installation are simple, thanks to a new setup routine which put together the various elements. As well as the printer driver, there’s a copy of Photo Quicker, which provides photo organization and print layout facilities.
The Stylus C84 is a admirably quick machine, producing five pages of black text in precisely one minute and printing a 5 x 3-inch photo at top quality in just two minutes nine seconds. The printer handles anything from plain photocopier paper from side to side to glossy photo paper and can print borderless images up to full A4.
Image quality is good for black and color graphics, though photo reproduction is subjectively not quite as good as from previous Stylus Color printers. The dot pattern, even though Epson quotes a very high decree of 5,760dpi, is noticeable in areas of smooth colour, and cooler shade are also more obvious than in the output of some other printers. The Photo Edition of the C84 comes with a six-way memory card person who reads, which is high-quality value for only £10 extra.
Epson – Stylus C84 features
Epson’s Stylus C84 is a fast, solid, general-purpose colour inkjet printer. It handles most print jobs with small fuss and is chiefly strong on text and mixed text and graphics prints. Although not quite as good as its precursor at printing photos, the long become paler and water-resistance of DURAbrite is good recompense.