A few weeks ago, I was loaned the Epson Stylus Photo TX720WD printer by XPR / Epson Singapore to test it out and give a review of it. It was exciting as the TX720WD has been considered one of the superior photo printers around.
If you are interested in the detail specifications of the printer, the Epson website has all the information. Some of you might prefer the PDF version, which can be downloaded here.
This image from the Epson Singapore website.
You would know that I take excessive amount of photos. Mostly food photos, but I don't print food photos on paper. They usually remain in digital form online either on this blog, Flickr or Facebook. What can I print and not waste the photo paper?
Wedding photos! For my wedding a few months ago, we engage a photographer to take photos for us. The photos taken came back in a DVD of all the raw images taken. It has been a few months and we have not send out the wedding dinner photos to our guests.
Most people our age prefer the soft copy emailed to them. We have also invited many uncles and aunties and parent's friends that would prefer a physical paper copy of the wedding photo. We thought we will print them out and pass it to them.
The review set that was loaned to me. Looks like it has been well used by many reviewers.
It's a 9.6 kg all-in-one printer, that scan, copy and print. You might think it's very big compared to the portable photo printers by other brands, but remember this is an all-in-one.
The machine can be connected to your home Wifi network, which I did. The CD Tray that you see is for printing on CD/DVD that has a printable surface and not to print from a CD. I did not realise that initially and tried to put the DVD from the photographer inside!
To print, you can insert the various formats of storage cards or use PictBridge connector if you wish to print directly from your camera.
A few packets of 4R glossy paper for printing courtesy of Epson/XPR.
This printer also prints larger sizes like A4 / Letter / Legal sizes.
This printer uses the 6 colour system.
They are easily replaceable too. The printer came with some used cartridges from the previous reviewer. To check how much ink was left, I could see it from the front panel on the printer. I could also check it using the software provided or even from my iPhone.
I printed the photos using two methods.
1) Using the iPad/iPhone App that I downloaded from the Apple App Store. I think it's also available from the Android Market.
2) Printing directly from my MacBook Pro connected via the USB cable.
The nearly a thousand photos that we have of our wedding has been loaded into both my wife and my iPad. We have been bringing it around so that friends and relatives can view it. We decided to try printing the photos directly from the iPad.
To print using the iPad, you would need to connect the printer to your Wifi network. It was quite easy to do that. Then turn on Wifi on your iPad to make sure you are on the same network and the App will detect the printer.
(Wifi enabled printer also means, all your various devices at home, can all share this printer!)
The screen capture of the iPad app. It was easy to use. We press on "photos" and selected the photos we want to print. You can select the number of copies, the output size etc all using the App.
Though it's convenient to print directly from the iPad, we found it a bit too slow. It takes too long to transmit the photo via the Wifi network. I am not sure if it's because we are printing using hi resolution photos.
If you have an iPhone and want to print the photos from your iPhone just download the free App.
As we wanted to print a lot of photos to be given out, I printed using my MacBook Pro instead. It's much faster. I did not install the programs that came with the printer to print.
I simply insert the DVD into the MacBook Pro and used "Preview" to view the photos and printed from it. That's because the photos were all taken professionally and I did not need to edit them. ;-)
The first few photos that came out had some 'fine lines' and I thought should not be the case. I did a 'print head' cleaning function and the subsequent photos came out superb!
For the next 5 photos, if you click on them, it will bring you to Flickr and you can choose the highest resolution photo to zoom in and see for yourself how the photos come out.
During our wedding, we gave out green apples as wedding favours after the ceremony in the church.
Are you impressed by the prints? The colour rendering is very good right? The printer prints at a high resolution of 5760dpi, I am sure you can see the difference.
We were pleasantly surprised by the quality and so did our parents when we showed them the photos.
We got married in our church that has these mosaic tiles. The colour comes out really well and almost similar to the real thing too!
For our wedding banquet, we ordered a real 3 tier cake that can be eaten to be served to our guests. I know some people are asking where the cake is from, it's ordered from Creative Culinaire, which is a cooking and baking school at Tiong Bahru.
Can you see the quality of the print out? The pattern on the edible bride on the cake can be clearly seen too! Remember I am taking this photo of a photograph and it can still be seen clearly.
I think the cake's really cute isn't it?
We took big group photos during the church and also during the wedding banquet. We printed a few of them on the A4 size paper and wow, it comes out really well! We could see all the faces clearly.
Some of you my real life 'older' friends, we will send you the photos printed on the Epson paper using the EPSON STYLUS PHOTO TX720WD. We will mail it or pass it to you all real soon!
Retailing at SGD$398, the Epson Stylus TX720WD is quite a reasonably prices printer, suitable for those who require good quality printouts.
Here's a link to the Epson TX720WD page at the Epson Singapore website:
http://www.epson.com.sg/epson_singapore/printers_and_all_in_ones/inkjet/product.page?product_name=Epson_Stylus_Photo_TX720WD#
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