I have received the printer and have set it up. I bought it online here in India
for about Rs 18000after heavy discounts. My initial impressions are very good. It is quieter than my old printer, and is definitely much faster than my old, broken R300.
Setting it up took a while as there are 6 bottles of ink to squeeze into the tanks, then one has to key in the codes and the printer will take about 20 minutes to prime the system.
I have printed only on generic glossy and Canon glossy photo paper so far. As expected, prints on the higher quality Canon paper look really good, they have the Wow factor. That was my impression when they came out of the printer. 4"x6" prints take about 25 seconds to print in photo mode and about 1 minute 50 seconds for best photo mode.
Text quality isn't very good. Passable, but not even close to impressive. I would not use the text output, even in best mode, for professional purposes. My brother inkjet produces better text output in best mode, possibly because of the pigment ink.
The Epson uses dye ink for all 6 colours so am not sure how they will last through time. I used a generic CISS on my old R300 and after about 6 years, even kept in an album, the prints are already started to go very very bad. however, those done with the original Epson inks are still sharp and beautiful as ever.
I'll have a full review up on my blog soon, once I use it a bit more.
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