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Epson's Stylus CX7800, the flagship of its all-in-one line, is a great middle-of-the-road, all-purpose unit that offers several features for taking charge of work-related chores, while packing in extra features to ignite your creative drive.
Inside its 17"x16.25"x7.83" smoky gray, faux metallic plastic chassis, the CX7800 houses a four-color CMYK inkjet printer that we found quite capable of delivering acceptable results with both text-based documents and photos. The printing mechanism draws on four individual ink tanks, which maximize each color's supply and helps curb the waste of costly ink. Rather than scrapping an entire cartridge when one color runs dry, with this setup you need only replace one tank at a time. The ink itself, Epson's DURABrite, combines the best of both the dye-based and pigment-based offerings. The specially formulated tiger in the CX7800's tanks are, in fact, archive quality pigment-based inks, so they resist fading for decades and will hold up well when subjected to moisture. But like their dye-based counterparts, the DURABrite inks also dry quickly, resist smudging and offer a brighter, more vivid color array. The CX7800's printer system harnesses Epson's Micro Piezo technology, which is optimized to emit variable-sized ink droplets as small as 3 picoliters, to ensure laser-quality text and sharp, lab-quality details in photographs, with resolutions up to 5,760x1,440dpi.
Along with its full-feature color inkjet printer, a built-in flatbed scanner is another great virtue of the CX7800's all-in-one package. Whether you're digitizing documents for your personal records or bringing treasured family snapshots into the digital age, the scanner end of the CX7800 is fully capable of the task. Its hardware resolution tops out at a maximum of 2,400x2,400dpi, which is fine for most printed materials, and through interpolation you can achieve resolutions up to 10,200x14,040dpi, which is especially beneficial for scanning slides and film. Did we mention the CX7800 comes packaged with a transparent media adapter? With this film holder and a fluorescent lamp embedded in the scanner's lid, you can make copies of 35mm filmstrips and slides. Epson also includes its Easy Photo Fix technology, which restores faded color in time worn-pictures, so you can easily restore and reclaim your old photos and images captured on film while digitizing them.
As with most other all-in-one units currently available from Epson, as well as other manufacturers, by combining a scanner and printer into one standalone device, the CX7800 presents an impressive array of additional features. It serves as a copier capable of duplicating paper-based documents, as well as photographs that are true to their originals. With the addition of a series of memory card slots that accommodate most of today's popular digital camera media, and a PictBridge-ready USB input, this printer and scanner combo serves as a full-scale personal photo lab, ready for practically any imagerelated task you can come up with, provided it doesn't include large or medium format film. To boot, most of these features are fully accessible with or without firing up your Mac.
As far as speed is concerned, we found the CX7800 capable of generating approximately five pages of plain black, 12-point text per minute. To create a more real-world scenario, we pulled up the CX7800's spec sheet at www.epson.com and printed it from our web browser. It took roughly a minute and half to print the four-page document. When it came to photos, we found the CX7800 could eke out a 4"x6" borderless color print in a little less than a minute, and a full 8.5"x11" in three to five minutes, depending on file type and resolution.
To test the CX7800's scan and copy abilities, we started with a series of professionally printed photos and first scanned them in. The scans showed no visible trace of artifacts or pixelization, even when we enlarged them by 200 and 300 percent. When placed side by side with the originals, each was a near perfect match. A few of our test prints did, however, look slightly less saturated than the originals, but it was nothing a little tweaking in Photoshop couldn't resolve.
–COLLIN KEEFE
Stylus CX7800: 
Epson | www.epson.com | 800-463-7766 | $180
Pros: All-in-one printer, scanner and copier that offers multiple direct print features for documents and photos, archive quality DURABrite, pigment-based inks and transparent media adapter for scanning slides and film.
Cons: Small 1.5" LCD preview screen.
Requires: PowerPC or better, OS 9.1 or higher, OS 10.2 or higher
macHOME recommends: Same
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