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Summary: A digital darkroom in your own home
Review: The 1280 prints beautiful professional like images that will rival any pro lab or competitors printers in its class or price range. Yes its a little slow and may want to use a little more ink than its competitors but when your print is complete you than can go to the next step and frame it and hang it up for display because it looks great.I have used other photo printers and achieved some good results but nothing as good as the 1280.Mind you your prints are going to come out as good as your digital images are in the first place Remember garbage in garbage out. You know by now their tons of software out than can help aid a soso image but it all starts with a great shot.If you choose the 1280 stick with epson photo paper or canon photo paper pro to achieve those great prints.Good luck and great shooting.
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Summary: Brilliant printer
Review: The first prints I made from this thing were great, and I've been very happy with the results ever since. I have gotten better prints when using Epson papers than other brands, which seem to leave the ink sitting more on the surface. One problem is that I haven't been able to get the roll-paper feeder to allow perfect edge to edge printing; I still have a white edge and have found no guidance in the manual. Also, the roll paper maintains a tight curl. However, the quality of the output is the most important thing, and that's just fantastic.
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Summary: Gorgeous print quality
Review: The print quality of the Epson Photo 1280 is gorgeous. On heavyweight matte or photoglossy paper the results are virtually indistinguishable from a print. It does consume a lot of ink, but that is to be expected. The only way to produce rich colours is by laying down enough ink to saturate the sheet which is being printed on. The only complaint I have about this printer are the ink cartridges. I would much prefer the ability to replace only the colours I've run out of as opposed to replacing the entire cartridge.
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Summary: Great Printer if you use it carefully
Review: The printer produces gorgeus prints under optimum conditions. But if you use non-Epson paper, the results are terrible. If you don't load paper perfectly, the printer will bend the corners. It uses ink unbelievably fast.For every day printing, it's no better than a $200 printer. For printing photographs up to 11x14" on Epson paper, it's spectacular. The borderless printing on 8x10" and 11x14" paper is very handy. It's great in combination with a 3 megapixel or greater digital camera.
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Summary: Wish I'd bought a cheaper model
Review: The printer works. It prints great pics. But, I wish I'd bought a less expensive version. We chose this one because of the wide carriage thinking we'd print out big pictures. Now, several months later, we still haven't even bought the paper to do that. We thought we might use the roll printing option, but haven't used that either.
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Summary: I produce my gallery prints on this printer
Review: There is only one way to improve the already superb quality of prints you get from this outstanding printer. At maximum resolution and unidirectional printing, the quality is better than the C prints I was selling before. The printer has been very reliable. Even 310 gm/sq meter water color paper feeds flawlessly. I am a professional gallery photographer, and I produce archival prints up to 13x19 on water color paper using the Generations Microbright archival pigment-based inks from Inkjetmall.com. Although Epson does not support this use of their printer, the colors, texture and brilliance of color are outstanding. With the Continuous Inking System, six four-ounce bottles sit on the desktop beside the printer, feeding ink to a permanent cartridge through little plastic tubes. This rivals the Iris printing system for smoothness and texture and detail and ability to print on quality art papers. If only it could print 16x20. . .
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Summary: Review of Epson 1280 Inkjet
Review: This is a great printer if you want to print photographs. Ditto if you want to print larger than letter/legal size. The former is of little value for someone designing games however. The latter is helpful to be sure but not 100% necessary. So far I have had a great deal of difficulty doing certain things. Some of this may be passed off as "still in the learning curve" but some is imo not that easy to explain away. 1. I have been unable to get files with business card sized playing cards to print correctly on Avery business card stock. The margin settings just do not give "what you see is what you get". For example printout appears to "stretch/skew" the attributes of my .bmp files about 5 percent larger whenever I am using the business card stock. This is not good because printing to business card stock must be absolutely precise. Mysteriously, when I print to heavy (110lb.) paper/card stock, I do get "what you see is what you get". I wasted a lot of ink trying to get the thing to print on the Avery business cards. Finally I gave up and printed to the card stock. Playtesters can simpy cut the cards it's not a major task. But I need to solve this problem if I intend to DTP. 2. Which brings me to my second point, which I was well aware of based on the many reviews I read. This machine will eat up ink, fast. It's simple, most use of color only puts color on like 3% -5% of the page. But when you are doing counters, cards, maps, etc. for a game you are printing on 100% of the page, or close to it. I've already had to order a replacement color ink cartridge. I shopped around on the internet carefully and decided to play it safe and ordered from Amazon, which was still about 20% cheaper than ordering from Epson. I've heard bad things about using so-called "compatible" inks and I don't want to wreck a machine I just bought trying to save another 5 or 10 bucks on ink. On the other hand you needn't buy Epson paper. I've used card stock, Avery label paper, and Avery business card stock and all printed fine in terms of print quality. 3. Another problem is I have discovered that you can do "full-bleed" margins (0.00) only with certain paper types and only with certain paper sizes. Guess what? You can't do full bleed with 11" x 17". And can only do full bleed for the most part by using paper settings like "glossy photo" - I guess Epson never thought of anyone finding an application for full bleed other other than printing photographs. Now this is not a huge problem. In the case of my 22" x 34" map, I can just print eight 8.5" x 11" instead of four 11" x 17". Or I can trim down the map so that it has some margins, since you can set 11" x 17" to a very small margin setting, like about 0.10. I've done that and printed some 11" x 17" and it looked fine. Colors generally match what you see on the screen. Like most printers you will seem some variation - browns for example are usually a bit off from what you see on the screen. So I would say an excellent printer for photographers (many professionals use this and their clients can't tell the difference from a traditional darkroom photo). For game designers I'd say very good, but with some limitations like I've noted. Unless you have a pressing need to print 11" x 17" (or 13" x 19" which the machine can do) you may well be better off spending [$] less and getting, like, the Epson 890 (think that's the model number).
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Summary: The best just keeps getting better!
Review: This is my fifth Epson inkjet printer. They have all been rocksteady and all have delivered the best performance (image fidelity) of their successive generations,...provided they are feed appropriate coated stock. While they are competitive with other mainstream inkjets, Epsons are not at their best as plain paper printers. They really shine with premium media. This model is incredible. Stunning color gamut. Tabloid size capability. Fast and quiet. The photographic quality output is virtually indistinguishable from continuous tone without magnification.
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Summary: Photo Quality Excellent
Review: This is, for me, a replacement for the older wide carriage Stylus Photo EX. It's quieter than the photo ex, and still slow (go for coffee while making big prints), but the results are worth the wait. Compared to a friend's Canon S9000, the photos have much more "pop" - better contrast (settable in the epson driver utility), exellent shadow detail, and overall, just look more like wet-processed photos than the Canon. I also like the paper roll holder on the Epson for panoramics, or continuous 4 x 6's. One other thing - my friend's canon is very fussy about the type of paper -- use the wrong one and the ink beads up and looks spattered. The epson is VERY tolerant, and I can use Kodak Premium Photo paper, or any of the other brands (like Konica, Ritz) that I've tried, and get really good looking prints. If you are looking to make photos, this is it. if you need a one-printer-does-all for printing your web-pages, email and memos, look elsewhere.
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Summary: Great printer but an ink gobbler
Review: This printer makes truly beautiful borderless photos. Quality, even on an untouched digital photo from a low end camera beats anything I have seen from a photo lab. Only one problem. It is truly an ink eater. It came with two brand new cartridges. I printed two 4x6 and one 5x7 borderless photo. My ink is already 1/4 gone. Needless to say I will be very careful what I print.
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