Epson Stylus C80

I've had my Epson Stylus C80 for three years and found it much cheaper to run than previous colour printers. It's been much more reliable than the HPs I have to use at work.

I have found that you need to be very careful clearing paper jams or you can misalign it. It doesn't like being left standing - the nozzles tend to clog and the cleaning cycle is rather slow, but the print quality and speed are great.

If you do not run this printer every couple of days, the sucker will up and quit on you. It is not very forgiving for the occaisonal user. I tried head cleaning over and over, and two different, new, VERY EXPENSIVE black cartridges to no avail.

The cost of the cartridges versus their performance is really unfair and frustrating. Unfair because at least half of the cartridge gets spent up while cleaning blocked nozzles and loading the ink... Am definitely dropping this model for a more cost-efficient and less stressing one.

The black cartridge went dry the day after I bought the Epson Stylus C80 Inkjet Printer, and Comet did not stock any for C80!! By the time I got a black cart. when it cleaned, (as this machine did every time it was swiched on,) it emptied the cyan cartridge! Then I found it costs £62 to buy all the 4 carts! Also it would NOT accept any of my coated card(160gsm), and would barely accept ordinary paper, and when it did you could hear the noise from my garage! I took the machine back to Comet a month after purchase, and they would not even discuss the matter. (I left it in the shop as I had no use for it, but had to go back when they threatened to throw it out). The idea of the 3 colours in sep. carts. does NOT work as by the time the new cartridge is replaced, and by the time it cleans, again, you have used up one of the others, and the machine just will not work. All of the nozzles just blocked up so it is useless anyway. I hope that both Comet and Epson take off into Space as I will not go near either of them again!

When I replaced my old printer with an Epson Stylus C80 Inkjet in late 2001, I was pretty happy with it. Epson typically has higher print resolution than a Hewlett-Packard printer of equivalent price, and the C80 uses about half as much ink as the C60, which sold for about 66% of the price. The plug-and-play install with Windows XP was painless.

Like all of the Epson inkjet line, this printer goes through a noisy and slow head-cleaning every time it is used. The need for the routine head-cleanings becomes evident if you use the printer infrequently, as I do (about once a month). Blank streaks appear in the print, and only multiple head cleanings (which use up the expensive ink quickly) or a complete replacement of the ink cartridges will fix it.

The Epson Stylus C80 Inkjet printer works well especially on photos, but when it fails, it does so in a big way! Downloading updated drivers is a problem. You end up with an "Epson Series" and more than you need. It also creates another printer icon when you download drivers, and goes haywire if you try to delete it. Just before breakdown of printhead movement, it spews paper all over the place without stop until the last sheet is gone. It continues to spew ink as it is doing a print job.