Epson Stylus C88+ Ink Jet Printer (C11C617121)

This printer is good for one year only thus be ready to purchase another one exactly one year from the date of purchase. About one month before the the year of purchase gives a message that internal parts need maintenance to call manufacturer for service, the part needed to be replace $150.00 plus shipping and handling if you buy a new printer $90.00 free shipping. I have purchase three of this printers in the last three years due to the printing I do "edible pictures" and the supplier of the edible ink does not support any cartdriges other than cannon and epson. Lines are always showing in the printing and have to be cleaning the heads every other page. Buy it only if you must..!!

Good luck.

We have two Epson C88+ printers which we bought because their price seemed reasonable. We are very unhappy with these because of their ink cartridge usage. First of all the cartridges are expensive. Next, we constantly having to clean the nozzle heads or align the heads to prevent gaps from appearing in the printed documents. This cleaning/aligning uses much more ink so the cartidges don't last as long as they should. By the time we get everything printing well, it is time to replace the cartridges. Lastly the printer stops printing if even one cartridge is out of ink. You cannot even print in only black if (say) the yellow is out. Several times when replacing the cartridges, I would shake the "empty" cartridge and it sounded like there was still plenty of ink left. I am wondering if their monitor get confused at times and reports a cartridge empty when it is not. By the way, BOTH printers exhibit the same behavior.

I have been using Epson printers for more than 20 years, starting with their dot-matrix models. This is the most unreliable of it all. A few months after purchasing, gaps started to appear in the output & cleaning the nozzles did not help. Little bit over 1 year, the printer completely broke down. In addition, never able to get the driver to work on Windows Vista so it was always a guessing game (& complete waste of money), when it comes to buying ink replacements.

Purchased this item on Dec 2, 2009. Set it up for use on Dec 7. Printed blank pages. Reinstalled software, cleaned carttridges, no go. Very disappointed. This printer was able to print absolutely nothing. Will be sending back to Amazon as soon as I get home from school.

My selection of our original C88 maybe 7 years ago was it's relatively rare (even then) parallel port which I needed in a failed attempt to salvage an old DOS database program. That printer went bad and my replacement was based on the fact it was cheaper than throwing out the spare cartridges I had for the original machine. It's a 4 cartridge system so the colors are adequate although not optimum--not a big deal as we have two other more capable inkjets on our network. Still--for $80+, it's a relative bargain