It’s big. It’s heavy. It has 6 ink cartridges. It prints phenomenally fantastic things. We have the Epson L850 in our office for review and I’ll start by telling you, if you enjoy taking photos, be it of your kids or animals, you cannot go wrong with the Epson L850.
I’ve currently got the Samsung NX1 on review (and they will need to pry it out of my dead clutching hands, FYI) and decided to print some of the pictures I’d taken with it. The print quality of the Epson L850 is fantastic. I ended up not only printing new shots but also most of my old photos in my house just because when compared together, the lack of quality on the old ones became very noticeable and strangely very annoying!
A photo of a photo won’t do this printer justice. Let me put it this way, with this printer I’d end up covering my walls and possibly ceilings in photos and I’m usually lazy when it comes to printing.
The Epson L850 is a 3 in 1 (so printer, copier and scanner). There are plenty of 3 in 1s on the market, many of which you can get at a very reasonable price, but honestly you lose quality fast as you start hacking down the price. The Epson ruined cheap printers for me because once you’ve seen what scanners should scan like, when flaws aren’t noticeable… that quality just cannot be ignored. Without going into detail about pixels per inch (tech talk, yawn) I’ll say it in the easiest way possible: this thing scans in at the quality at which it prints out. A SARS IRP5 form has never looked this beautiful.
I’m gushing about this printer but it really does a wonderful job. Setting it up was extremely easy as it is as plug and play as they get. For the amateur photographer, mom trying to record every memory or just someone like me who likes pretty pictures on her wall, you aren’t going to go wrong with this baby.
However, it’s an expensive one. At R6900 excluding VAT it will hit your pocket hard. While it runs on an ink tank system (so you buy bottles of ink as opposed to cartridges), the Epson L850 needs 6 bottles to fill the tank (at a cool R200 a bottle). Although they last a very long time you will need to replace the ink… and budget for that.
