Ink Jet printers are a dime a dozen at retail chains across the country. You will see a dozen or more lined up in formation at any given time. Well whatever its position in the formation is, it is time to introduce you to a printer whose technological life may out last that of your computer; the Epson NX 430 Small-in-one.
Un-boxing it was a simple pleasure. While a printer may be a printer, the surprise of the Epson NX 430 Small-in-one was that it came with ALL of the ink cartridges to start up. They are not dwindled down ink cartridges either, but instead, the (Epson’s name) high capacity. This is almost unheard of, as most printers (from experience) require you to purchase ink separately, or they come with ½ or even ¼ filled cartridges. It is one less thing you need to worry about. In fact, the only thing it does not come with is a USB cable, but that is industry standard.
Along with full ink cartridges, it comes with a very well written manual and software of course. From un-boxing, to printing my first document was less than minutes. This included software installation and WiFi set up, as well as setting up the Epson iPrint app from the iTunes app store and android marketplace. It is also notable that while everything that you need is pretty much in the manual, there are great how too’s on Epsons’ website
This was tested on a Desktop PC and Laptop, both running Windows 7 as well as a laptop running Ubuntu 11 (linux). Install was a breeze. It was also tested on an iPod Touch 4thgen and two separate android tablets running Honeycomb and Gingerbread respectively. These were all done wirelessly.
The cd’s were needed only once (for the main desktop). I did not need a USB or NIC Cable as it detected my wireless network and immediately attached once I put in the password. Once that was done, the Windows 7 laptop and the Linux laptop was able to see it and pick it up fine. Over the network setup took less than a minute, including printing of test pages.
It prints on a variety of mediums, from plain paper, to heavy stock, to varying types of photo paper.
It is a snap to use.
Due to having card readers onboard, you don’t even need a pc to print your pictures, documents. The lcd panel also allows you to see what you are printing, as well as having set up and scan commands right there.
So how fast is it ? Well you may think it is a laser printer thanks to its speed. It boasts between 9 and 9.5 pages per minute, depending on color (b&w being quicker), but in testing, I printed a 10 page single spaced b&w document, and it did appear to take less than 1 minute. Color printing was as fast as advertised and impressive at that. The single cartridges (instead of the one rgb) really make your color projects jump out and say HI ! Envelope printing is negligible, it took more time to type in the address than it actually took to print
Photo printing was the biggest pleasure of this printer. A 4x6 on ultra glossy paper took less than 15 seconds to print, and was pretty much dry as it exited. An 8x10 took about 25 seconds to print and was equally impressive for both color and speed. In estimating ink usage, It was cheaper for me to use this printer and print duplicates of my daughters’ school picture than to order them through the studio. Now that is incredible.
The last tests were with the iPod Touch 4thgen, and two android devices running gingerbread and honeycomb respectively. After I downloaded the Epson iPrint app (Apple’s Air Print is another option for iOS only) from the app store and android marketplace, it took less than one minute from install to printing my first picture. This is crucial, as there are many 3rd party useless printer solutions that just won’t work. So now, not only do you have a printer that will work with multiple OS’s, but it includes iOS devices as well.
It is truly a tremendous printer, and quite possibly the only one you will ever need due to it’s crossing many platforms for true compatibility. Learn more at Epson.comor head on over to amazon.com for a great deal.
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