Home > Consumer Reviews > Epson Stylus Photo R2880 A3 Photo Printer

The second Epson printer to fail on me in a week. First an R285, then I thought I might get away with moving upmarket to something that was built a little better. This one produced the most wonderful prints for the first day, but since then has entered a cleaning cycle every time I've tried to print. Ten print-outs, 80 pounds worth of ink, one hour on the telephone to Epson in the US. I've tried two different versions of drivers, printing from two different programs and from two different computers. The printer has to go back.

Very very irritated! Epson, "exceed your vision"?? More like Epson, "better off colouring it in by hand".

I've had this printer 1 week now and have only printed to epson archival matt paper so far.
Results are very encouraging for the first batch of prints. Mono prints are excellent with no colour cast that I suffered with by now defunct R1800.
I've found the best results are to print straight from photoshop using the supplied profiles for epson paper, and disabling the color management.
Cons: If you need to change cartridges (Matt black to Photo black), it takes ages to purge out the old ink and is quite wasteful. Sometimes it doesnt recognise the change and needs the printer switched off and on again.
Its best to do a batch of printing on matt or gloss to avoid frequent swaps.
Why didnt epson make it to hold both blacks at the same time - like my old printer?

I have had maybe 4 decent photos from this machine (£125 each!). There is roughly a 1 in 20 chance of it feeding the paper through without a selection of warning lights and false feeds occuring. It goes through ink at a rate of knots, and will demand a new cartridge after just a few (maybe 20) pages of normal text printing. If only I had used it more in its warranty period I would have sent it back long ago. I will now buy a cheap inkjet for text printing, and send all my photos off to a professional lab - far cheaper.

This printer is just fantastic. It comes bundled with the K3 ultrachrome inkset cartidges, including the vivid magenta, and the resulting prints are vibrant and accurate in tone. I now work with a very well controlled colour workflow - from calibrated monitor through to calibrated printer, and the prints from this printer match the on-screen image near-as-dammit. I am utterly delighted!

Firstly this printer gives excellent print results apart from that I wished I had never bought it and wouldn't recommend it at all. Art paper through single feed at top back misfeeds continually, is very labour intensive to actually insert and when it does misfeed, 50% of the time!!!! its a long process to correct and get it to feed again. You have to stand over the machine and just keep re feeding paper and re setting the print driver, very labour intensive and frustrating. I have recently read numerous blogs on this and it seems its a common problem with this machine, which Epson is turning a blind eye to. I have tried to adapt the feeder so the paper doesn't catch on a plastic lip (design fault) on the rear support, however the paper has continued to misfeed but less often!!! Also the print cartridges are tiny for such a large print printer another Epson trait of getting more money with no thought to the user you can hardly get a decent number of A3 prints out of a set of inks what are they thinking of? All I can say is that I have always bought Epson printers, I am in the process of up grading to a 7900 but thinking seriously of Canon now. Don't buy the R2880.