Epson Stylus Px730Wd All-In-One Printer with High Speed Wifi and Double Side Printing (Print, Copy, Scan and Screen)

This printer replaced my HP 7280 all in one. The Epson 730 is used mainly at home for scanning, printing homework, occasional colour document printing and photo-copying b&w docs in the home. (I mainly use a laserjet for B&W printing). I spent about a week looking at HP, Epson, Cannon and Brother in the 100-150 pound price bracket. Decided on this printer because it offered the best specified print heads at the price plus it had airprint and a print email server. This purchase was a compromise between performance, cost and features. I couldn't find anything that offered all the features I really wanted for less than 250 pounds and I wasn't prepared to pay that much for an inkjet. I am technically competent and work in tech industry.

The good:
-Good overall design and the touchpad interface particularly works well and is surprisingly intuitive
-Airpint and email print sever, works flawlessly and is very easy to set up
-Wireless set up and connection works flawlessly, printing in less than 15 mins from taking out the box
-Photo print quality is exceptional, text is OK, but not the best, photo-copying OK
-Duplexer (double sided printing) works great
-Ability to leave it switched on and for it to go into sleep / active mode automatically
-Ink prices are excellent. I'm used to paying 20 pounds for ink, even Epson original ink is only £10, non Epson ink £3
-Six separate ink cartridges, I prefer this set up for good colour reproduction although some printers only have four or five cartridges.

The not so good:
-Text printing is fairly poor with bleeding at text edges and a slightly fuzzy look to some text fonts. It's good enough, but could be a lot better, most folks won't notice but I just have a critical eye
-Duplexer at the back of the printer adds 30% to the depth of an otherwise nice design and relatively compact device. Measure carefully if placing it in a tight space or cupboard
-Software interface is very poor. `Epson Scan' and print preferences is very poor with minimal features and control options. I think Epson got confused here between what features to put on the printer touch screen and the computer software. HP is definitely ahead by a clear mile in this control software area. This was a big disappointment with the Epson because I'm used to lots of software control over scanning, print output and other features
-The user guide is very poor and while detailed user guides to set up more complex operations are online via Epson UK. The Epson UK site had dead links to these guides and the CD guides didn't work either for me. So I went to Epson's USA site (where this printer is called the 730 Artisan) The guides there are a million times better and include video guides.
-A blue light constantly flashes on the printer every time it's used for printing, scanning etc. I've put black tape over this annoying feature. What is the purpose of a flashing light Epson ? how totally annoying !

Other Stuff:
-I read reviews that the paper tray was flimsy, but I find it OK, just as good as other makes and probably better in most cases, than other brands
-The paper collector mechanism (collects paper after printing) could be a better design, mine wasn't installed correctly and it pulled-off completely when I first used it, but I refitted it correctly and its now OK.
-This printer should have a sheet feeder mechanism; the price difference to get a similar Epson printer with this feature is over £100 more which it too high, for such a simple feature that's included in competitor models at this price.
-Where is the OCR software (optical character recognition software) I couldn't find this despite an OCR file on the CD which was empty !
-I haven't used the card reader slots or other media reader slots, but they look fairly standard and allow you to use the printer without the computer.

Overall, then a pretty good printer for the price, but it probably has a little more design flair than function. The features like initial set-up, airprint, email server and touch screen are really excellent, but what good is that if the text printing is poor. Scanning is good, but scanning software lets it down badly...I now use `Photoshop'. Photo printing and photo copying is very good as are ink prices. In fairness I am comparing it to my old HP printer that cost in excess of £300 when new, whereas this Epson cost a third that price and so can't be expected to perform at the same level. For a mid range printer though it's a good buy and you can't really go wrong with this choice. The HP printers in this range are not good in my opinion (too bulky / not robust) but the Cannon Pixma MG6250 might be worth a try and for me it was ultimately a toss-up between this Epson and Cannon. I chose the Epson ultimately, because of it's low cost ink prices, features, particularly airprint and email server and in my case a two-year guarantee that will give me two years of hassle free printing. When I next change printers in 2-3 years I expect performance / price will have moved on again.

Bought this printer to replace my HP printer as it started to have some problems. I have had Epson printers in the past and haven't had problems.
The Epson PX730WD is a great printer it was so simply and quick to set up and the quality of the printing is fantastic and a plus side to the printer is that it prints double sided. It does everything my old printer did and more. It also looks great and smart. I tested the printer out and I printed photos and the quality of the print was excellent. It also has features on the printer to crop your photos and enhance the photo.
Really glad I bought it and I would recommend this printer to any one else who is looking for a great printer that prints really good quality photos.

I bought this to replace an old Epson printer that had gone a bit wrong - it wouldn't print red for some reason. Will probably sell it to an Everton supporter....

This printer is simply excellent; I love the fact that it can print on both sides of the paper and that it has 2 x paper trays, so you can load both your plain A4 and also your photo-paper. Being able to print CDs / DVDs as well is an added bonus.

The quality of the photo printing is superb, as good as that found in 'high street' outlets. The A4 documents I have printed look almost like a laser print, they are exceptionally detailed. No complaints on the print quality at all.

The WI-FI function simply works. No hassle, no problems, it simply connected to my wi-fi signal and allowed me to connect a couple of other laptops to it. One was Windows XP so I didn't expect much problems with that, the other was Windows Vista (groan!) that I expected to have trouble. But none at all; both instantly saw the printer on the network and printed test pages instantly. My wife is now happily printing off her web recipes that she finds from the kitchen, whilst the printer is in the office.

It also allows you to print over the web (you can set up a unique e-mail address for your printer) so you can e-mail a document to yourself from anywhere in the world and it will print here. This could be handy for my sister who lives in New Zealand - she can send letters to my Mum via e-mail, they print out here and I post them for delivery next day. Darn site quicker than using normal mail from Wellington!

Finally, there is an Epson 'app' that allows smartphones to print directly to this as well, over the wi-fi connection. We had a birthday party for my mother in law yesterday and everyone was busily snapping away with my Galaxy Note. Then I just printed them over the network to the PX730WD and out they came. It prints onto the right paper automatically, so no 'messing around' to select the right tray.

All in all, I am very pleased with this. The unit looks very smart as, with no visible paper tray, there is no horrible 'fanned paper' at the rear sticking up. The touch screen controls are very responsive and allow you to do many functions without a computer switch one, which is handy. The usual array of memory card slots are available for printing directly from a non-wifi camera, plus a USB plug.

Finally, it is also worth noting that my 'main' computer, which I use most of the time, is a Mac. This also works fine with the Epson, something which my last printer couldn't do. All in all, I am very pleased with this and, for the money, I think it's a steal.