Rating: 
Summary: Nice features, lasted only 13 months!
Review: I purchased this printer in February of 2003. It is a good printer with many useful features, however the print quality started going down and it quit printing cyan. After replacing the cyan cartridge, and doing many cleanings and test prints with no results, I called their tech support. Epson tech support was great and they agreed that my problem is a printhead filure, however where it is just out of waranty they would not replace or repair the machine. I feel that a printer should last more than just over a year, especially since it was not used a great deal, and the failure was due to a product defect. I wish that Epson stood behind their products.
Rating: 
Summary: Smart Buy
Review: haven't had any problems with this unit at all. works very fast and always prints flawlessly. prints a great photo. it loves to suck down the ink when printing photos a little more so than most other printers. maybe that why the photos look so good?
Rating: 
Summary: CX5200 Satisfied Customer
Review: Scanner is very easy to use. Color copier makes photo copies easier than running them through the computer. My husband bought this for me, but is always wanting to move it to his office. For the money this is a GREAT machine. The extra's that it can do, ie putting your photo in a card frame, placing a face in a "fake" setting. This is a versatile, fun to use item.
Rating:
Summary: Awesome Quality Reproductions
Review: Whenever you buy something, you always find things about it that you're disappointed with. Place several rocks in a box, give it as quick shake, and that's what it sounds like when it feeds a page. However, the registration is always right on and it never jams. I've gotten used to it by now, and expect it, to make that noise. I always refilled the ink cartridges in my Epson 740 and expected to do the same with the 5200. The ink cartridges now have a chip in them, which prevents them from being refilled. You can order a re-setter to do this, but I have not yet done this.I am very, very happy with the quality of the copies it makes. I have used the color copy feature a lot more than I expected to.
Rating:
Summary: Good multifunction printer unit for home or small office
Review: The CX5200 reminds me of a Toyota Corolla: inexpensive, functional, does everything it is supposed to reasonably well, and does nothing glaringly wrong. I've had a lot of inexpensive printers, and rarely have I been as happy as I am with this unit. I use it in my home office, with a duty cycle of about 500 pages per month. It meets my needs because it does tripple duty as a flatbed scanner, a printer and as a personal copier. I work for attorneys and print documents which need to be filed with the court. Most inkjet printers are only marginally acceptable because the ink runs when wet. This printer/scanner/copier uses Epson's "DuraBrite" ink, which is water-resistant. (It just would not do for the Judge to get black ink all over his fingers!) This also makes me more comfortable printing envelopes, which might get wet in the rain! Another feature of the ink is that it is supposed to be colorfast for something like 80 years years, rather than a few months like some inks. The Epson has three separate color ink cartridges, so you don't have to change all three colors if one runs out. Like most InkJet printers, the manufacturer sells the printer cheaply and then makes the money off of the ink cartridges. But Epson's price for ink is no worse than most of the others, and better than some. If you don't need the high quality DuraBrite ink, cheaper OEM ink tanks are available. Black print quality is very good. The charactes are not smudged and the edges are sharp. The color print quality is good enough for web pages. It is not as good as the black print. The colors are reasonably accurate, with no major errors. I had a cheap Cannon printer which would print firetruck red as crayola orange - Cannon seemed to know about the problem, but did not fix it - which is why I bought my first Epson. Connecting the CX5200 to the computer and loading the software was easy. It has a USB port, but no parallel port. The software includes the standard Epson printer monitor, which pops up when you are printing and shows you how much ink you have remaining in each ink cartridge, and the progress of the print job. It also includes optical character recognition software, and Epson's Smart Panel, which I am not happy with because it does not recognize WordPerfect. The "Smart Pannel" is functional enough, but a little clunky. I prefer the interface of Visioner/ScanSoft Paperport. Strengths: High quality, light and water resistant inks. Black ink cartridge prints up to 1,240 pages (5% coverage), about twice as many as many inkjet printers. Saves space by having printer, scanner in one unit. Low price. Weaknesses: USB connection only, no printer port. The unit is a bit large and the paper feeder is noisy. Wish list - automatic sheet feeder like on the Brother printer, OCR software which interfaced directly with Corel WordPerfect, rather than just Microsoft products.
Rating:
Summary: i love it
Review: not a single problem, high quality printout, easy to use...perhaps a bit loud at first but not really that bad... a great deal
Rating:
Summary: Anyone had success using non-Epson ink with CX5200?
Review: Hi! Has ANYONE had success using non-Epson replacement ink cartridges or ink refill kits with the CX5200? On this model, the printhead is attached to the printer rather than the (replaceable) ink cartridge, which makes it much more prone to clogging and damage if one uses non-Epson ink. Still, I am willing to take the chance on non-Epson ink if someone out there has had a positive experience with a particular company?
Rating:
Summary: Works well with Linux as well
Review: I too have been very impressed with this combo. At the moment, I've got it connected to a Win2k systems and share it to other machines on my home network. Works great! Printing is quiet outside the initial paper feed, which doesn't really bother me. I've also had it attached directly to my SuSE Linux (v8.1) system and, after doing some digging around for linux printing howtos, found a way to use GIMP=PRINT driver for the C82 to print to this perfectly and also to use SANE to scan docs. Only problem I had with that setup is that the Win2K box complained that it couldn't print because the drivers on it and the Linux box were incompatible. Dont have the same problem in reverse. For the faxing capabilities, it's not bad for faxing a single page, but to do more than that requires opening something like Work, scanning in all the pages from there, and then "printing" to my fax driver. As someone else has said, if you want a decent fax, you could buy one for under $50 with the money you save on this printer. --Dann
Rating:
Summary: Good over all multifunction printer
Review: This printer replaced my HP Officejet 720 (after almost 7 yrs). I've had the Epson printer since February 2003. Everything has been working fine. Easy to install on a Win XP Pro Dell laptop. Print quality is excellent. B/W text prints cleanly. Photo prints come out very impressively. Keep in mind that this is a 4-color ink system. I've seen better photo outputs in a 6-color ink system BUT have yet to fine a multifunction printer with 6-colors. I do recommend this printer.
Rating:
Summary: Best purchase I have made in years!
Review: Greetings! I have been using this unit for already half a year! I brought it right after the unit was launched by Epson, and I believe the 5200 and 3200 are the first All-in-ones made by Epson (at least in North America). When I first read its specs, I was totally in awe. I mean, its impossible to find an all-in-one with 1200x2400 at 48bit especially at that price point! So I went out and brought it right away. Boy, this is one of the best purchases I have made for some time! The standalong copying function is so convinent, with enlarge, reduce, etc. The printing quality is excellent, after all, it uses the same core as the excellent C82 printer. I never bother with any other brands b/c their photo printing I think is a bit better than competition, especially Canon (I have a few friends with older canons, and their quality is quite bad) (this was years ago though so they may have improved, but I doubt it after reading a number of recent reviews). Also, another reason when I stick with Epson is I have excellent expreiences with them. I have the Epson Stylus Color 640, Epson Stylus C80, and of course the CX5200. All are still in great condition! I also have 4 scanners to-date, they are the Umax 1220S (Scsi), Agfa snapscan e40, Microtek ScanMaker 4800, and of course, the 5200. The scanning, I have never seen scans with such high quality (at least at this price point. Finally, the scans are crystal clear and relatively accurate in terms of color. Ok, there is one bad (but can also be good) thing about Epson printers. Note that when you replace ink carriages on all other brand name printers, their print head gets replaced. But on the epson it never get replaced. This can be a bad thing because eventaully the head may be worn out (because the head gets heated up everytime you print). So that means you have to replace the head manually if it dies. On the brighter side of things, this also reduce cost for each carriage. That I believe is also why epson inks are so much cheaper than HP / canon. But note that as an Epson user myself for close to eight years, I still don't have any problem with the print head. So it may just be fine also. Probably not even a problem... In response to "An electronics fan" from New York, NY United States "Want to scan a single page black and white document and save it as a tif? 9 megs!". You know that you can change resolution and dpi right? Saying your image files are too big... that is totally unrelated to the multifunction unit itself, you have to adjust the resolution, image size, color mode etc to get the right file size you want... and of course the type of image you save as also matters. So that comment I believe is quite unrelated to the scanner itself. If you use the same settings on other brands, your file size will still be the same, because they are just digital data... their size don't get big/small for no apparent reason. Anyways... This drivers (both scanner and printer) works on XP. The software also works on XP, but I didn't really bother to use it anyways. IMO its interface is kinda n00b. Don't know why some people can't get it to work. Its so easy to install and use. I currently have RedHat Linux 9 and FreeBSD 5.1 installed, but haven't tried working with the printer yet. Though I heard some people got it to work. (don't remember if its the scanner or the printer, but I think both will work under these two OS) Colclusion: I love it, its one of the best all-in-one you can get one the market in my opinion (For its specs). And for some reason this unit is so cheap! Excellent deal, excellent purchase. Oh, did I mention that it looks good? I don't know how the new CX5400, CX6400, and R500 are, but so far I can say this unit is just a great innovation, and is very reliable.
| 
