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Epson Stylus CX6400 All-in-One Multifunction

Epson Stylus CX6400 All-in-One Multifunction

List Price: $239.99
Your Price: $180.49
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Great Multifunction Printer!
Review: After doing a lot of research and talking to friends I finally decided on the Epson CX6400, and so far it has been great! It produces great color prints and can print crisp, clear, dark black text at about 10ppm. The photos it print are with rich colors and are clear. PHOTOPAPAPER REALLY ENHANCES QUALITY! It can copy about as fast as a standard copy machine, and can print directly from compact flash, memory stick, and SM cards. Setup was very fast and easy to do, it has a illustrated setup guide included. It can also act as a card reader for your digital camera. It does not have a fax machine included with it. The only other drawback that I have seen so far was the time it takes to start printing, about 30 seconds. The features are:

Color Printing-approx. 5ppm
Monochrome Printing-approx. 10ppm
Color Scanning
Color Copying
Card Reader

I recommend this printer to anyone looking for an affordable multifunction color printer. Epson remains a great supplier of printers!

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Won't print without 4 full cartrisges
Review: DON'T BUY IT! It won't print, including in black and white, without four full cartidges. What moron thought of that?!

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Cramming it all on the Head of a Pin
Review: For those who can't afford the table space for separate machines for scanning, copying, and printing, this item is a very good solution, if not perhaps quite as small as a pin-head. Though considerably larger than a standard ink-jet printer, it's still small enough to fit on most computer tables, and considerably smaller than what three separate machines would occupy.

The assembly and installation instructions were adequate to the task, much better than most instruction books that are poor translations of Japanese or Chinese. Assembly itself took about five minutes, consisting of mounting a couple of page guides/holders, removing some shipping tape, and installing the ink cartridges. The included software installation went without any hitches on my XP machine, and the operating system recognized the new USB device as soon as it was plugged in (NOTE: don't plug in the USB cable till told to do so in the installation instructions). Having the printer connected via USB is quite an advantage - no big bulky cable, and transfer speeds are much higher, significant when dealing large high resolution scanned images.

Of course, the real test is making it do some useful work! My first test was a five page Word document with embedded italics, super and sub-scripts. This printed in about thirty seconds, about 5 seconds of which was the XP operating system setting up to send the document. Print quality was excellent using the default printer settings, barely distinguishable from a laser printer output.

Next up was scanning in a glossy 3x5 photograph. At the default settings, this scanned in as a 1440 x 1000 pixel JPEG image (about 300dpi). Looking at the resulting file with Olympus Camedia software at 400% image size, some small graininess can be detected, and there were some small spots that were apparently dust specs picked up by the scanner - so a must is keeping the scanner bed and the item to be scanned absolutely clean. Taking this same image without alteration and printing it back out on CX6400 using high quality glossy paper and printer default settings, and comparing to the original, some slight loss of definition and brightness was noticed, but there was no banding, blotching, or significant color alteration. Using this same photo, scanned in using higher resolution, 'fixed' using the supplied software, and printed at the printer's best settings produced a print almost indistinguishable from the original, though it did take a significant amount of time to print at these settings, about six minutes.

Copying text pages produced good copies, but it took an inordinate amount of time to start printing, over six minutes with image enhancement turned on, and about two minutes with it turned off, set for text, black and white only. The provided software control panel for this looks very much like a standard office copier display, so finding your way around the various options is pretty easy. The supplied OCR software (ABBYY Fine Reader 5.0 Sprint Plus) worked very well on a standard text page, but it did eliminate the spacing between paragraphs.

The provided image enhancement software is fairly basic. If you need to do serious work with photos, I'd recommend using Adobe Photoshop rather than this, but if most of your work is cropping, eliminating red-eye, hue/saturation/contrast adjustments, this software will be quite adequate.

I have not tried the memory card reader functions, as my camera automatically interfaces to my computer as a USB drive. For those who need such a reader, though, the CX6400 provides interface ports for just about all types of memory cards.

Price wise, this machine is quite competitive with other multi-function printers on the market. It's best feature is its high resolution for scanning and printing photos, which few other machines match, and it works quite well as an everyday text printer.

--- Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Nice Hardware, Poor software (on MacOSX)
Review: I am very satisfied with the print quality, borderless on photo paper is just stunning.
As a scanner the printer is really hampered, on Mac OSX, by the supplied drivers: The installer crashed a number of times, the "Smart controller" often unexpectedly quits.
Also, the screens in the "scan and save" function have many field that I just can't edit, for example the Format where you could choose between PDF, JPEG is stuck at JPEG, a real bummer. The resolution field is also unmodifiable.

The software is obviously a bad port from windows, as it does not obey the most basic keyboard shortcuts (cmd-W to close a window does not work, cannot tab between fields etc). The "Smart panel" is laughable, especialy its "advanced settings" that's totally useless.
If I had known this I would not have bought the printer.

And yes, I went to Epson site to get the latest drivers&software.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: great all in one, I'm very pleased
Review: I bought this about six months ago and I've been very happy with it. It was exceptionally easy to install and set up. The images it prints are outstanding. I love being able to make a copy or print from memory cards without my laptop being docked and running. I like the separate ink cartridges for each color (black and the 3 colors) so I no longer throw away some color ink because the blue has run out, for example).

I've always bought HP printers (perhaps 5 or 6 over the years) and this is my first non-HP printer. I decided to try this because comparable HPs were more expensive, but also reviews from other owners complained about how long they took to install their software and what a space hog the software is. I had no idea really how bad it was until last week, when I helped a computer-newbie friend install her new HP all-in-one with a built in fax. After waiting over 45 MIN. to finish the software install, I was sure it had stalled, and I stopped the install and started over, this time doing a minimum install. There was no warning whatsoever that it could take over 1 HR to install the software (and this was on a new, pretty fast machine)! The minimum install went much more quickly, and as she will not be using all of the image editing features I doubt she'll miss the full install. I'd simply never seen anything like it with any of my other HPs, and apparently there is quite a ruckus about this known problem with some of HPs printers. It is inexcusable, in my opinion, not to give owners advance warning and choices of what to install.

In any event, I couldn't be happier with this all-in-one. I don't know about problem print heads, and I hope I don't encounter them, but given how inexpensive these machines have become, perhaps it just makes sense to move to the next model when encountering a major problem. That is certainly bad for our landfills, but what else can one do?

BTW, do use the high capacity black ink cartridges (T043120)for this machine. Nearly twice the printing capacity at much less than twice the cost of the regular capacity cartridges.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Great Value
Review: I bought this printer a little over a month ago, and I am completely satisfied. I used the card reader for photo prints for the first time last week and I really liked the process. Prints came out very nice. Comparable to an HP photosmart printer, but I feel like the epson prints were much nicer because you don't have to wait for ink to dry. Colors are just as vivid as an HP photo printer. But I do suggest that you buy DuraBrite Photo paper. This optimizes the photos appearance.

The printer is very easy to set up, Nice speed and very quiet. This is a great value for anyone looking for a quality multi-function printer. Especially with the great rebate Amazon is offering at the moment. The only reason I gave it 4 stars is because it is a little bulky. But that is expected from a multi-function printer. I would LOVE for these to shrink a tad bit!

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: BUY AT OWN RISK!!!!
Review: I bought this printer because of the good reviews BUT the paper feeder has the WORST quality. After using it for a few weeks, it broke down, printing/ scanning pictures or text with no top margins and very wide bottom margins. I called up EPSON and they exchanged my NEW printer with a REFURBISHED one AND as soon as I got it, there's soemthing wrong again with the feeder. It could not "sense" the papers. So I called them up again & they again sent me a REFURBISHED unit AND THERE'S SOEMTHING WRONG STILL WITH THE FEEDER. This, by far is the worst printer and WORST warranty coverage EVER!!!! I emailed their customer service to file a complaint and they did not even respond!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Best customer support ever
Review: I had difficulty hooking up the printer on a wireless network shared by a Windows XP computer and a MacIntosh Powerbook. Epson's customer support spent a good 40 minutes on the phone with me helping me to solve the problem. The best customer support ever.. patient, clear, and courteous.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Dead after first birthday
Review: I had purchased this all-in-one back in December of 2003. During the past year I mainly used it for general use. Setup was easy enough, and the quality was adequate for what I needed.

At the beginning of this month, the printer started printing in lines and was not legible. I had purchased all new color and black cartridges, thinking that perhaps on of them had clogged up. After installing the new cartridges, I had the same problem. So, I would run the head cleaning utility, print a test page, run the utility again, print a test page again...you get the picture. The ink levels are now down to 30% and the printer is still not working correctly. I tried to clean out any clogged ink within the printer with no luck.

The printer was good for the time it lasted, but I will not be purchasing an Epson again.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: just what I wanted
Review: I have been very satisfied with my purchase of the Epson Stylus CX6400. I had heard horror stories of all in one units being poor quality but not with this unit. It does an amazing job of
printing pictures of good quality. I especially like the one touch copy feature without needing the computer. Now with a digital camera the card slots make transferring pictures a breeze. Do not hesitate to buy this product.


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