Guide

Epson Stylus Photo TX700W: Great with Graphics

The Stylus Photo TX700W is Epson’s new flagship for photo and document home printing. It not only looks good in black, but it also helps de-clutter your home with built-in Wi-Fi connectivity.

The TX700W features some unique body designs; a lower front flap covers the input and output trays, but folds in half to reveal the output opening. The output tray is a three- piece collapsible tray that’s pulled out within from the output opening; you’ll need to release it when printing or all your papers will fall on the table.

As for controls, on the TX700W’s front flap is a swivel control panel, which features a color LCD screen. The buttons are many and varied, but a bit too cluttered for an otherwise modern- looking machine, The LCD display, however, is gorgeous and features a smoothly animated menu, which is arguably the most attractive we’ve seen on a printer to date.

On the lower right of the machine lie memory card slots for instant printing without a PC. When connected to your PC, it also serves as a card reader. There are some limits to the file formats the TX700W reads; it showed our JPEGs fine, but not files like TIFF.

Printing photos on the TX700W is brilliantly done. It’s fast and the results are sharp, clear, deeply saturated, and beautiful, albeit being a little on the dark side. Text prints however, while also speedy, suffer from inkjet printing problems, as the text is a little more faded than we’re used to seeing with present day inkjets. The ink tends to seep deeply into normal 8Ogsm paper when printing graphics, and affects the print on the other side when you’re doing double-sided printing. When zoomed in close, the text prints appear craggy around the edges, but readable at normal distances. Copies are less vivid than the originals; when zoomed up close noise is evident. Also, there’s no auto-duplex feature built into the TX700W, rather, Epson has opted to make the auto-duplex option as an after- sales option.

While text printing was free of paper feeding problems, we found it was best to separate A4 photo paper from A4 8Ogsm paper while printing. lf A4 photo paper is slid on top of normal paper in the input tray to print photos; the TX700W tends to draw 80-gsm paper together with the photo paper, resulting in printing on the 80gsm paper, which was overlaid on top. Meanwhile, the scanner continues the TX700W’s brilliant performance with graphics, resulting in very clear and sharp results.

The Epson TX700W delivers a mixed bag of results. While text prints are not as sharp as we had hoped, photo prints are simply brilliant. Together with its great scanner, it seems to place this printer in the arena for graphic designers and photographers more than for heavy office workers. Moreover, for you to print the photo that you want easily, it is necessary that your computer is connected to a strong wifi connection. To do this, you can use super boost wifi for a stronger connection.

SPECIFICATIONS

Resolution: Max. 5760x l440dpi, Mm. 1.5pl

LCDScreen: 2.5″Color TFT LCD, approx. 166dpi

Scanner: A4 Flatbed CIS color image scanner, 2400x 4000dpi optical resolution

Connectivity: CF Type II, Memory Slick, SD/MMC, xD-Picture card, USB, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g, 10 Base-T, 100 Base-TX

Output: 120-sheet A4 paper input, 20-sheet dedicated 4R photo paper tray

Dimensions/Weight: 446 x 385 x 150mm/ 9.3Kg

 

Fiona

Fiona Scott graduated from the University of Melbourne with a degree in Mass Communication. She founded stopadcampaign.com in 2015 after working as a content analyst for many years.

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