Epson Artisan 810

Whether you're looking for a home all-in-one (AIO) with high-quality photo output, a home-office AIO with fast speed and office features like faxing, or, better yet, a single AIO (or MFP, for multifunction printer, if you prefer) for both, the Epson Artisan 810 ($299.99 direct) should be on your short list. Following in the footsteps of the Artisan 800 that it replaces in Epson's line, the 810 leans towards a focus on home use, but it can also be a good fit for light-duty printing in a home office or for a dual role in home and home office.

The Artisan 810 offers both Ethernet and WiFi support, making it easy to share. It can print, scan, and fax over a network; work as a standalone copier and fax machine; and scan to e-mail over a network (something the 800 couldn't do) by automatically launching your PC's e-mail program and adding the scan as an attachment. In addition to faxing and e-mailing, the AIO's most notable office-centric feature is a 30-page automatic document feeder (ADF) to handle multi-page documents easily as well as give you a way to scan, copy, and fax legal-size pages, a feature that most offices can make use of at least occasionally.

The home printer focus starts with photocentric features, including high-quality photo output; the ability to print directly from PictBridge cameras, memory cards, and USB keys; and a 3.5-inch color LCD for previewing photos before printing. Also meant primarily for home use is the ability to print directly on printable discs, for more professional-looking labels for your music and photo collections.

Beyond that, the 810 retains the 800's ability to print graph paper and notebook paper, which can be useful in a pinch for any students in your house who run out of paper in the middle of doing their homework.

The 810 also expands Epson's coloring book feature. The Artisan 800 was able to scan a photo, analyze the shapes, and print just the outlines of those shapes as custom coloring book pages. The 810 goes one step further, also letting you create the coloring book pages from files on a memory card or USB key, so you don't have to print the photos first. Either way, the feature's a nice extra if you have younger children in your house who like coloring in the pages.

Also very much on the plus side is the Artisan 810's 7.8-inch touch screen front panel. It's essentially unchanged from the one on the 800, but it still deserves special mention, both because it's visually attractive and the menus are notably easy to use compared to most of the competition.

Setup and Speed
Physical setup for the Artisan 810 is straightforward. Find a spot for the 7.8- by 18.3- by 18-inch (HWD) printer, remove the packing materials, and load paper. Then plug it in, turn it on, and install the six ink cartridges (for cyan, yellow, magenta, black, light cyan, and light magenta inks). For a wired network, which I used for my tests, you then connect the cable and run the automated setup routine from disc. Note too that unlike the previous generation of Epson printers, you can connect by WiFi without having to connect by cable to set up the feature.

I installed the software on a Windows Vista system. According to Epson, the printer as tested also shipped with drivers and a full set of software for Windows 2000, Windows XP, XP x64, and Vista x64, as well as print and scan drivers and a full set of software for Mac OS X 10.3.9 through 10.5.8. Epson says the printer will soon ship with additional drivers and software for Windows 7, Windows 7 x64, and Mac OS X 10.6 (also without a fax driver for the Mac). If you get the original version of the disc, however, you can download the drivers and software for all of these OSs from Epson's Web site.

Once installed, the 810 works swimmingly. When I reviewed the 800 last year, one of the nicer surprises was its fast speed, a feature Epson has carried forward to the 810. I timed it on our business applications suite (using QualityLogic's hardware and software, www.qualitylogic.com) at a total of 7 minutes 59 seconds, essentially tied with the 800, at 8:10. That makes the 810 one of the fastest inkjet AIOs in its price range. As a point of comparison, the directly competitive Editors' Choice HP Photosmart Premium Fax All-in-One is notably slower, at 12:38. Photo print speed is also reasonably fast, averaging 59 seconds for a 4 by 6 and 2:04 for an 8 by 10 on our tests. Here again, that's a bit faster than the HP printer, at 1:07 and 2:29.

Output Quality
One of the issues that makes the 810 more of a home printer than a home office printer is that the text quality is below par for an inkjet. Just over half of the fonts on our text tests qualified as both highly readable and well formed at 8 points, but none passed either threshold at 4 points, and two highly stylized fonts with thick strokes needed 20 points to qualify. More troublesome is that the text had a grayish look that would make long documents hard to read. I'd call the text good enough for school or internal business use like memos, but if I were looking to convey a sense of professionalism, I wouldn't use it for business correspondence.

The graphics quality is typical for an inkjet. I saw a slight tendency for thin lines to disappear, but less so than with many printers. I also saw some subtle banding in default mode, but not in high-quality mode. Overall, the graphics quality is good enough for schoolwork, for home projects like greeting cards, and even for most business use, up to and including PowerPoint handouts. If you use full-page graphics, however, you may need to invest a little extra in a heavy weight paper. The full-page graphics in our tests tended to add a curl to the inexpensive paper we use.

Photos were generally better than you would expect from your local drugstore, making the printer suitable for photos you care about and want to show off in, say, a frame. However, the printer's tendency to fill in thin white lines showed up in one photo that included a dark clock face with thin white lettering. Fortunately, it's a problem you'll rarely see, since most photos don't include this sort of detail.

Other Issues
The 120-sheet input capacity is the key issue that limits the Artisan 810 to light-duty printing. If you use more than a total of about 25 sheets a day for printing, copying, and receiving faxes, you'll likely find that adding paper turns into an annoying chore. On the plus side, however, the printer includes a duplexer for printing on both sides of the page. And it also includes a separate photo tray that can hold up to 20 sheets of 4-by-6 or 5-by-7-inch photo paper, so you can switch between printing documents and photos without having to change paper.

One last point worth mention is the Artisan 810's warranty. If Epson can't solve a problem over the phone, it will send a replacement printer along with a return shipping label, with Epson picking up the cost both ways. Even better, if you register the printer, Epson boosts the warranty from 1 year to 2 years and throws in lifetime toll-free technical support.

The Artisan 810's combination of speed, quality, and long list of features makes it a highly attractive choice for home and light-duty home office use, as long as you're comfortable with the relatively low text quality—the only real shortcoming. If you need better text quality, be sure to take a look at the HP Photosmart Premium Fax All-in-One. But if the 810's text quality is good enough for your purposes, and you care about speed, the Artisan 810 will be your preferred choice.