Yesterday my office printer finally rolled over and died. It’s not like i wasn’t expecting it to do so, it was an old Epson R220 that had moved around my office every time I needed a little desk space and had ended up on a bottom shelf behind my desk. The two things that the R22o had going for it was the large supply of ink I had been given by a friend and the ability to print onto CD/DVD media.  I never used the printer for photos, I have a variety of printers for that, including the Epson 4000 and the Epson 2200 and now I have access to an Epson 9880, but more on that soon.

While trying to print on a DVD yesterday for a customer, the black nozzle seemed to be clogged. I ran the head cleaning multiple times and it seemed to make the problem worse. Each time I ran a new head cleaning more and more colors started disappearing. Then two of the ink cartridges had too little ink to continue the fruitless head cleaning. It was time to replace the printer. So I went to Fry’s to buy a new printer. The only things I needed was the ability to print on CD/DVD’s and do a good job on printing things like invoices and letters.

Enter the Epson Artisan line of printers. I really liked the idea of a printer with built in Wi/Fi and the ability to print on the CD/DVD with a built in CD/DVD tray. Since I kept losing the media tray that came with the Epson R220, I really liked the idea of the media tray being internal. The price was right too, at $149 for the Artisan 700 seemed like a great deal.

Installing the printer was a breeze. I managed to install the printer in it’s wireless mode and install the drivers on both laptops and desktop in under and an hour, and everything worked perfectly. Best of all I no longer have to use one of my Apple Express modules to take care of wireless printing. After taking care of the CD/DVD print job, I ran a series of tests running Matte and Glossy paper and the printer performed flawlessly.