Epson’s Inkjet Printer

The Stylus Color 880 is a high-resolution inkjet printer for companies wanting professional quality color printouts. It can print at a maximum resolution of 2880x720 dpi. The USB and parallel port connectivity options make installation easy. It comes with drivers for Windows 98/NT/2000, and Mac. 

The printer supports various printing modes to cater to different requirements. An option called High Speed can be turned on or off for all, but for the econo-mode, which prints at 360 dpi. This option affects the print speeds and quality. Other modes print at different resolutions of 720, 1440, and 2880 dpi with an option of turning High Speed printing on. The printer can be configured to print in mono or color modes–using black, or color cartridges. 

It supports a large number of paper sizes–envelopes, index card, and even user-defined sizes–and a variety of media like photo paper, inkjet transparencies, labels, greeting cards, and matte paper. We took out plenty of printouts from the printer, which it handled well without any paper jams. 

We also tested the printer for color and monochrome graphics, and line art. The quality at high resolutions is excellent. Both monochrome images and line art are very smooth and fine. We then printed a colored image on photo paper at 2880 dpi resolution, and for the sake of comparison, used a similar printout from Epson’s Stylus 680. The image’s details were much clearer in the Stylus 880. The printer can also print on glossy film and premium glossy paper. 

When we tested the printer for its text print-speed, we found a couple of interesting results. Under econo-mode, the maximum print speed we were able to obtain with the printer was 7 ppm as against its rated 12 ppm. Printing at high-speed in normal mode reduces the speed to 6 ppm. With High Speed off, it reduces to 4.5 ppm. Here, we also noticed that a couple of lines of text became slanted when we printed in normal mode with High Speed on. With High Speed off, however, text quality was very clear. So for good text quality, it’s recommended that you keep the High Speed mode off in this printer. The document we used in this case had about half page of text. With a full-page text document, the print speeds under normal mode and high-speed off reduced to 3

ppm. 

The printer has some useful buttons and LEDs on its front panel. For example, its power button can also be used to clear the printer’s cache memory, apart from its normal on/off function. There’s a maintenance button for head cleaning, loading paper, or resuming printing after an error. Another button is meant for ink cartridge replacement, which moves the print head to a position from where it can easily be pulled out for replacement. The LEDs indicate various states like printer on, receiving or printing data, and paper jam. It has an input buffer of 256 kB to cache data when it receives any document for printing. 

The printer’s cartridges are also well priced at Rs 1,160 for color and Rs 1,150 for mono. Overall, the printer is a good choice considering its excellent print quality. Text print speeds are, however, a little disappointing. 

Ankur Saxena at PCQ labs