Need a good printer? Try the Epson R300

A few days ago my girlfriend went to print some resumes for her job search. Unfortunately, her old Canon printer was barely printing colors and black not at all. She went and got a new black cartridge, but the printer still wasn't printing blacks.

I did the usual troubleshooting, and Canon suggested replacing the print heads. Problem is I couldn't find out where to buy them. Plus I figured that it was a good time to buy a new printer.

I wanted a printer that had built in memory card reader, that had good resolution and had separate ink tanks for each color and black.

I also didn't want to pay more than $150 or so. I found the Epson R300 photo printer. Got it from Newegg.com for $152 after tax, shipping and including an extra black cartridge. Purchased a multipack of the other color cartridges from Mwave.com for $60 after tax and shipping.

Ordered the items last Thursday. The printer and color cartridges arrived today and I expect the extra black cartridge will arrive within the next few days.

The printer is able to print directly to the surface of a CD or DVD made specifically for printing on. It also has the built in card reader that is compatible with just about all the modern memory card types. The resolution is also pretty high at 5760 x 1440.

Set up was fairly straight forward and basically required unpacking from the box and removal of tape strips. Then I plugged it in and inserted the cartridges. Next I installed the software supplied by Epson which included a photo-edit tool and drivers for the card reader.

Working with the card reader is same as working with any other card reader. Windows just sees it as another removable media device and assigns it a drive letter accordingly, then it's just a matter of copying or moving files from the card to a folder on your hard drive, or you can just work on the photos while they are on the memory card.

Lastly, I did some test prints. I used plain white paper as I didn't have any glossy photo paper available. I just want to say "Wow." The quality is pretty incredible even on plain paper. The color quality is excellent and the grains are smaller than texture of the paper. The speed is pretty fast as well. It prints a sheet of four 3.5" x 5" photos in under 60 seconds.

It prints text documents about as fast as a normal ink-jet printer and with about the same quality. Not what you'd want to use for professional looking text documents, but passable in a pinch. Text quality is good but is marred by bleeding of the ink into tiny but noticeable spikes surrounding each character.

Some might feel that the printer is a bit wide, but that's a very minor thing given the features and quality of the output of the device.

As for reliability of the printer? I'll have to do an update in 6 months or so on how it keeps together over time.

Final bits of information: The printer allows you to print directly from the memory card if you want, which can be handy if you want to output index prints or just want to quickly print off some photos for friends and family from photos that would only require minor adjustments anyhow. Has a USB 2 interface, does not come with the USB cable and also has an optional Bluetooth print adapter that you can purchase to print directly from Bluetooth enabled phones, laptops or other devices.

At any rate, if you are looking for a printer for photo printing and some general use, I would definitely recommend the R300. If you will mostly be doing print of text documents, particularly for professional use, I'd recommend getting one of the cheap sub-$100 laser printers, of course then you won't be able to print color.

Oh and I should also mention that if you buy one now you also get a $20 mail in rebate.