Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Excellent features and performance at a reasonable price
I've had this printer for about 3 weeks and am extremely pleased. I've used it for text printing, copying, scanning and, more recently, photo printing. The performance has been terrific - I printed out an 8x10 photo that looks comparable to one produced by a portrait studio. For photo printing, it is critical to take the picture at high resolution, and to ensure that the printer is set to the proper settings (e.g. the "best photo" setting, photo paper setting, and several others.). While I've read reviews on other sites that complain about photo quality printing on this model, I think that following these guidelines and using good photo quality paper ensures good quality printing. Also, the printer does not seem to drink up ink cartidges the way others are reputed to, and has the convenience (and economy) of allowing you to replace separate color ink cartridges.
Rating: - Overall excellent home product
this is my first epson product and I am more than happy with my purchase. The price for what you get is excellent. Scanning was simple. Basicly you put in a picture or face down book and press scan and the software takes care of the rest. Compared to my last scanner (microtek) this is a dream. The software is intuitive and didnt require my going thru help menus to figure out. The unit, being multi function integrates with printing and that makes it easy too. Not to mention *not* needing extra cables and space to connect separate units. The printing is quicker than my last printer (HP) especially in black and white. The printing speed isnt what I would call lightening fast, but it works well for me as a home user. Color printing is somewat slower. You can set preferences to do more *draft quality* prints as a preference. Something that saves ink and makes the print jobs go quicker. The epson software comes up when you are printing and shows you how much ink you have left. In black, and the three colors... very nice. That you can buy the cartridges (the colors separately) is wonderful. No more waste. The one drawback Ihave found is that I find it fairly noisy. Not necessarily much noisier than my last one but still I was surprised. I have found that you can vary the print quality based on your needs. Rough drafts to presentation modes. I think a flat bed scanner is essential as you can not sheet feed things to copy that are from books. This is a wonderful, and so far, trouble free unit. Well, worth the money (I paid a bit more than the current price) and it suits my purposes very well
Rating: - Good machine for the price
I needed a new printer for my iMac running 10.2.4, and liked the features of the Epson Stylus CX5200. I liked the idea of having the scanner, copier and printer all-in-one, allowing me to preserve very limited desk space.
First impressions? Fairly bulky machine. It is a tall unit (about 10" tall), and takes up quite a bit of room (17"wide by 19" long with trays extended). Still, it is less room than if I had to accomodate a seperate printer and scanner. NOISY. Yikes! My last printer was an Epson Color Stylus 880, and this is very loud in comparison. This might be a consideration if you will be using this machine in a shared office space or a central home location. It is difficult to talk on the phone if the machine is printing. Print quality and speed are excellent. No complaints about the performance of this machine. Terrific color copies and good-quality scans. As far as performance, I think all aspects of this machine work very well for this price. One final note, the Epson Stylus CX5200 is very quirky with Mac 10 X. It is fine when you are running OS X, and also fine when you switch to classic mode. The problem comes in when you switch back to OS X. The computer stalls the print queue, and then cannot find the printer. I called Epson about this and they say it is a known problem, and the problem falls on Apple. No fix is expected. (I have to restart my computer to print if I return from classic mode to OS X. Not very convenient.) Overall, good machine except for the drawbacks mentioned (size, NOISE, and OS X problems).
|
