Epson Stylus Photo R1800 Inkjet Printer

The Epson R-1800 uses huge amounts of ink- not to print the beautiful prints it is capable of, but to constantly unclog it's printhead. If you heed Epson's mandate to use ORIGINAL ink, you'll go broke. After time, when you stop using it a lot, it completely fails to clean it's printhead. It's box is very sturdy, though, and should provide years of storage use.

-5 out of 5 stars Bad printer - don't waste your money -
LEMON!!!!! I bought this printer because of all the rave reviews. I have had it a year and have not have even one good print. The ink is very expensive. The printer eats cartridges. When the color only printed out blue I tried to clean the cartridges, and while cleaning the cartridges I went through 4X of each of the 7 colors. It cost a fortune! I kept thinking it was a fluke, maybe the ink was all dried up. But even buying cartridges from different stores didn't help. My computer said it was out of ink each time a new cartridge was inserted. I ended up spending more on ink than the computer cost. Throwing it out the window would be a delight except that would be more effort than this printer is worth.

This review covers both the R1800 and R2400:

I find it very unfortunate to have to write this review. I own both the Epson R1800 and R2400. As a professional, working photographer, I gave thought to buying the 4800.

I will never buy an Epson printer again.

First, I have never had drama-free printing. All I was trying to do with either printer was get a 20 image portfolio completed. Neither machine was able to get through the job without either needing an ink change, have the heads realigned or fail to communicate with the IEEE port. So, the workflow becomes interrupted and, by the time you figure out what happened, you're way behind and wondering where you left off.

The R1800 has created huge black streaks with larger format papers. It's useless for larger prints.

After owning the R2400 for about 16 months, it just developed a fatal flaw with horizontal lines which are not correctable by head realignment nor using the think paper command (a sub dialogue in the maintenance menu).

The R1800 developed a blue shift that is uncorrectable.

Notably, these machines have relatively little use, because it was impossible to get a workflow going with them anyway.

I contacted Epson regarding where I could get the machines repaired. I never heard back. Latest estimate from a private shop is a total of $500+ to get the machines functioning again.

What a shame.

It prints great. I have gotten very nice pictures and scrpabook pages -- 6 pages to be exact. The problem is that if you don't use it on a daily basis, you need to clean the print heads every time you want to use it. This wastes tons of ink. I have printed exactly 6 12 * 12 scrapbook pages before all my ink run out. This is an expensive proposition when you take into account the cost of the cartridges.

I've owned this printer for a few years. It worked great out of the box, with a PC and Windows XP. I printed out of Photoshop Elements 2, Olympus Camedia, Canon camera software, and Epson's software that comes with the printer. The printer seemed to handle all these software packages well. 4x6 prints were perfect. 13x19 were perfect. I even used some 10x7 scored cards, which fold in half to a nice 5x7 card with photo on the front of the card--with a little trickery in Photoshop. This is a great printer on a PC.

I've had horrible results on a Mac. Too dark, too saturated, inflexible paper sizes (specifically, I couldn't get the 10x7 --> 5x7 card option figured out). Works horribly if you let Aperture 1.5 control the driver. System managed color is better, but still way too dark. I could go on, but the web is littered with discussion forums of Mac users disappointed with the Epson R1800. It seems Epson never provided good drivers for the Mac platform. About all I got from their tech support is that I should buy Epson paper (which is ridiculous, since it worked flawlessly on a number of high-quality papers when driven by a PC).

If you own a Mac, or are even thinking of migrating to a Mac within 5 years, AVOID the Epson R1800.