Epson Stylus Color 680

The Epson Stylus Color 680 has the potential to be a good printer! The print quality is clean and sharp, and the print program enables the user to expand the print area to as little as 3mm borders all round on an A4 or letter page size, which is good when photocopying books or texts. Alas, it is let down by frequent paper feed problems. It feeds multiple sheets of paper, and jams. The print cartridges need frequent charging, which prompts the feed rollers to turn in reverse, pulling previously printed media back into the printer, fouling print heads and smearing inks across rollers and printer parts. Multiple sheets of paper (two to six, or more, sheets at a time) are frequently drawn in by the printer causing jams or fouling of print heads.

Consequently, it is impossible to trust the printer to simply print as expected. It needs to be supervised for every sheet printed.

The printer consumes large volumes of ink, and operating costs are only reasonable when using compatible makes of ink cartridges. Cartridges (Epson or compatible makes) are 'chipped', therefore, they have to be discarded when empty.

The printer is noisy in operation, and is likely to disturb any other people in the same room.

Epson manufactured this printer for only a very brief time, and this shouldn't come as a surprise, given the frequent criticisms of its performance.

The Epson Stylus Color 680 had the highest quality 2800 x 720dpi for under £100 when I bought it 5 years ago, it's still running and prints great photos that all my friends have marvelled at. Black is excellent also, crisp and business like.

The Epson Stylus Color 680is the worst printer I have ever used. It is unbelievably noisy and often feeds several sheets of paper through together. Should have bought another HP or Canon.

The Epson Stylus Color 680 is a horror show of a printer. All output till date was never even near average. It's horribly expensive as the printer devours your ink in a matter of days. I would not suggest anyone to buy this product.

I bought a used 680 recently. The cartridges had to be changed and when i went, got a big shock. They cost almost as much as i paid for the printer. These cartridges cant be refilled, unlike most HP models and unlike some older epsons, bottom line epson got smart in the short term by putting the initial price down and looting on the cartridges. now i dont plan to buy the cartridge, rather i will sell it to someone who thought he could save some money. Someone dumb like me, that is. I have owned another epson 320 or something, that too was a pain in terms of output quality. NEVER ANOTHER EPSON. Anyday HP is better-model to model, thats what evryone says. Or even Canon.

I bought this printer in Jan 2001 to replace 2 previously very reliable and economical Epson's. The 680 used up it's black cart before it had printed the test page and after shelling out £25 for a new one the colour cart ran out about 30 pages later despite the fact I hadn't done any colour printing. I spoke to both Jungle where I got the printer and Epson both of whom said this was normal. I also found out that it wouldn't print from DOS which although my fault for not checking was another cause of irritation. The 'chips' fitted to the carts prevented refilling and meant that not all the ink was used. To get around this I bought the Jet Tec resetting kit which was around £20 including 2 new carts and a 'chip' resetting device. The printer was very noisy in use and the build quality was not up to previous Epson models. After around 6 months use the noise and lack of DOS compatibility had wound me up to the extent I bought a HP deskjet and I believe the Epson is now in the recesses of my garage and long may it stay there. I would NEVER by an Epson again.

This Epson Styluis Color 680 inkjet printer is a nice looking piece of kit and I was very happy with it for the first three or four months. However, it uses very expensive ink at a very high rate even when not being used for printing. At first I left it switched on all the time. However, this meant that every time I started the computer the printer tests itself and uses some ink, even if it isn't used for printing. Most of my printing is black only, but the colour cartridge goes down rapidly even when it's not been used.

In less than two years of very light printing use it has consumed three colour cartridges and three black cartridges. These cost nearly £30 (for one colour and one black) from the Cartridge Club; genuine Epson cartridges are approximately twice this cost.

I wish I'd known about this before buying. I would not recommend this printer, and would certainly not buy this brand again.