Epson R800 worth it?

The Epson Stylus Photo R800 has been on the market for quite some time now.

Is it still worth it to buy one, or should I be ashamed of myself for considering it, and instead go for another printer?

I want to print photos (doh) up to A4 size, and I want the ability to print on CD/DVD media. Support for glossy and non-glossy paper without the gloss/nongloss of the color being significantly different from the glossiness of the paper. And I prefer good ageing properties of the prints.

I'm just struggling to figure out a good christmas present for myself. I do have a super-duper print shop a couple of minutes walk from my work, but it really would be nice with a good photo printer at home.

I love my R800 and it has been trouble free from the get go. Only thing I have to compare it with is an old Lexmark and I had bad results from it and a small (4X5) Kodak which did a good job but was slow. Not sure there are better printers out there but the R800 has been great to use. Ink is not supplied by a some places here....Best Buy & Staples do not carry TO 54 type ink but Office Depot does.....but they've recently gone up. I just order mine from Epson and it's delivered right to the door. The printer will tell you when its low but will continue to print reliably right up till the lowest cartridge is empty.

Thomas Cole wrote in post #13576284
I love my R800 and it has been trouble free from the get go. Only thing I have to compare it with is an old Lexmark and I had bad results from it and a small (4X5) Kodak which did a good job but was slow. Not sure there are better printers out there but the R800 has been great to use. Ink is not supplied by a some places here....Best Buy & Staples do not carry TO 54 type ink but Office Depot does.....but they've recently gone up. I just order mine from Epson and it's delivered right to the door. The printer will tell you when its low but will continue to print reliably right up till the lowest cartridge is empty.

Besides having one of the countrys best print shops minutes from work, I also have one of the countrys best photo web shops (with support for local delivery) 15 minutes walk from my home. So ink availability should not be an issue.

I'm just wondering if a printer released 2004 or maybe early 2005 is still worth buying or if there are newer printers that should be selected instead.

I have an Epson RX600 which cost me nearly $600 like 80 years ago. Before that i bought Canon and Lexmark that both crapped out after about a year. When i junked the Canon i had about $300 worth of extra ink that had to be thrown out and that killed me. I got the Pixma 9000 MKII and gave Canon another shot only because for $50 it was far cheaper then buying ink for my old Epson. Considering the print quality of my almost 10 year old printer then 800 should be good enough for those who aren't making large prints for clients.

I figure I could use a print shop if I really do need larger prints.

I wouldn't go with the R800. I would go with Epson.

We purchased an R800 back in 2005 and, for it's time, it was a decent printer. Two years or so later, we bought an R1800 and it made the R800 images look poor. You could print a copy of the same image on each printer, put them side by each & pick apart the one from the R800. We sold it at that point.

We ran the R1800 until a couple months ago when we upgraded to the R2000. We probably would have gone longer with the R1800 but the ink pad was getting full & it didn't make sense to get it replaced. We ran thousands of prints off of it, mostly 8-1/2x11 paper, some 11x14, a few 13x19, also hundreds of CD's/DVD's.

R2000 has prints somewhat better than the R1800, which were pretty decent to begin with. If I were you I'd take a serious look at it if I could justify the initial outlay.

To my knowledge, the R1800 has the same print engine as the R800, but the R1800 supporting wider prints.

Don't know about the print engines, can't say. Wider paper, yes. They did use the same ink.

We were running a calibrated monitor & printing the exact same file with PS running the show, not the printer. R800 skin tones were decidedly yellow, as was most greenery (grass, leaves, pine needles). There was also less contrast in the R800 prints.

We were printing team photos on location at a Dragon Boat Festival using both printers.

The drivers for the 1800 may be slightly improved even if the hardware is exactly the same. I would still buy based on need rather then anything else. Those who view your photos aren't going to do a side by side of prints and therefore wont know the difference.

Forgot to memtion in my earlier post that I use a very old Gateway computer and adjustments to brightness, contrast etc can be easily made with controls below the screen. By trial and error (very little work), I've been able to get excellent prints from the R800. I have now added a Toshiba lap top with a Share Doc to the Gateway.....but when I print from the lap top, prints are not good at all so I print from the Gateway until I can figure out how to cheaply calibrate the lap top.

Hello

I have just scrapped my R800. It was a superb photo-printer and I loved it but after several year's use it became increasingly difficult to clean the nozzles and I would often empty over half a tank before I got them clean.

As I only print A4 I am trying a Canon Pixma Ip 4950 (my early Christmas present) and so far it looks to compare well with the R800 using Ilford Galerie paper.

If you buy one I'm sure you will get many years of good prints from it but I just wonder if there isn't a better A4 photo-printer out there (like my new Canon) after all technology moves on very rapidly.

Best Wishes

Geoffrey Pocock