Epson Artisan 810 All-in-One Printer

The Epson Artisan 810 is at the high end of all-in-one line; but for the price, it delivers a great value. It prints very quickly and photos in particular come out with startling quality and richness. It's got all the handy bells and whistles you could hope for, from built-in wireless (very easily configured) to automatic duplexing. And the printer's enormous (7.8-inch) and tiltable touchscreen makes it a snap to use. For a little extra money, this printer is truly a best buy.

There are a lot of good things to say about the Epson Artisan 810, starting with setup. Unlike HP's Officejet Pro 8500, setup (including alignment) took only a few minutes. That includes the time spent configuring the wireless networking; the printer's enormous touchscreen--the biggest I've ever seen, at 7.8 inches--made that process simple and fast.

Print speeds across the network were excellent. A three-page Word document printed using the built-in duplexer took only 45 seconds to print, with text coming out sharp and clear. Even more surprising was the speed of photo printing. At only 30 seconds, it printed a gorgeous 4x6 photo more than a minute faster than the HP 8500, and way faster than the Canon Pixma MFC-255CW, both cheaper printers. So you do get something more for your money here. The color prints were fantastic.

The printer also offers a built-in CD tray so that you can print on (some) CDs; unfortunately, there was no information in the instruction manual about this process (you can, however, access information on CD and DVD printing via the Online User Guide). Still, it was easy to figure out; there's a CD Tray button on the machine, and the tray can be accessed by lifting the touchscreen. Still, more information about sizing the photo to properly fit on the CD would've been helpful. It took about a minute to print a very good image on a CD.