Epson Stylus C84 Inkjet Printer Review
At under $100 the Epson Stylus C84 is very good value for money. Usually budget printers are hamstrung by high ink usage or poor performance but the Epson Stylus C84 manages to avoid these possible pit falls delivering a complete and inexpensive package.
Epson Stylus C84 inkjet Printer Review
Great bang for your buck
The Epson C84 is a solid design. It's cheap to buy and reasonably cheap to run and would be perfect except that prints lack the quality of some of it's admittedly more expensive competitors.
Epson Stylus C84 a good value printer
The Epson Stylus C84 supports both parallel and USB connections and is both PC (Windows 98 and above) and Mac (OS X) compatible. Epson is also selling two network-ready versions of the C84, the C84N and the C84WN, which have Ethernet and 802.11b wireless networking interfaces, respectively. With the low entry price of the standard model these network enabled models are worth a look.
Text quality is excellent, even on photocopy paper. Even characters as small as 2pt, in both serif and sans-serif fonts, were clearly legible, with the good ink efficiency you could feasible use it as a low volume office document printer.
Photo printing is average when you compare it to others. The Epson C84 prints borderless photos for 4x6-inch and letter-size images which is a nice feature, but the real killer is the water resistant ink. Having resilient ink is really important for photo printing so your precious photos don't get damaged while they are being passed around. While HP ink seems to resistant to fading on Epson offers true water resistant ink which will really appeal to some buyers.
The major gripe with this printer is that the default print settings aren't really the best quality. While you can go into the drivers and improve the quality a lot this comes at a major costs in print speed.
Here are the specifications:
- Speed: A4 color prints 12ppm, 22ppm black text
- USB and parallel port interface
- Total Input Media Capacity 120 sheets
- 5760 dpi x 1440 dpi color and black and white
- 4 inkjet cartridge design
Epson Stylus C84, great value but slow for high quality printing
The water resistant ink really is a useful and unique feature. I like this printers running costs but the new cartridges it takes mean that you'll have to buy Epson original ink for the mean time.
text and color looks good if your prepared to adjust the default settings but print speed will disappoint. Overall if price is an issue the Epson will deliver with good all around performance for a very low cost. If you need the very best color prints then perhaps look elsewhere.