Epson All In One By Zenith4183 on Jan 08, 2009 - Updated Oct 15, 2011

This printer was part of a free gift for the purchase of my laptop. Retail price was $99 I believe. This printer is both a printer and a scanner. While the thing did work, it didn't work well.

When trying to print a document, the printer would just sit there for a while. Sometimes I wasn't sure that is was receiving the print info. Then it would start to make this bizarre clucking sound while it thought about what it was going to do. Eventually it would start printing. It wasn't the best resolution, but for printing mostly text documents, it was okay.

While I could live with its extreme slowness, what I hated was how it treated ink. Everytime the printer is turned on or set to print, it will test the ink level. It does this by dripping a bit of ink onto a sensor. As I very rarely used color ink, the color ink level shouldn't have dropped very much. After about a year of these supposedly small drips, the color cartridge was empty. As I almost never used it, I thought I'd just leave it empty and save buying another cartridge, but the printer's manufacturers had other ideas. The printer will not work with an empty or missing cartridge. It will just sit there and cluck while the computer moniter displays a small barrage of error messages. I don't think the scanner would work either without the ink. I ended up having to buy another color cartridge.

Then there was the scanner. It worked and it had a fairly decent resolution. It was slow, but not as slow as the printer. The scanner was the only reason I kept the thing connected to my computer anymore as by this point, I'd now gotten a new laser printer. Then the scanner stopped working. It claimed that it was no longer connected to the computer. I tried to fix the problem for a while with no luck. This device now lives in my closet waiting until I finally take it in to be recycled.