Epson Debuts Workforce, Artisan Printers

By Staff On Sep 4 2008 - 6:00am

Epson pulled back the curtain on several new products for the fourth quarter, including a new brand for printers targeted toward "micro" businesses and traditional consumers.

Epson's assortment will now include Artisan, for high-end consumers; WorkForce, for micro businesses; and Stylus, for photographers.

Both new Artisan all-in-ones will offer built-in Wi-Fi and Ethernet networking and feature six-color Claria ink and Epson's DX5 print-head technology, which creates five different ink-droplet sizes as small as 1.5 picoliters. They will also feature memory card slots and PC-free printing and copying.

New for these units, Epson will have its automatic photo-correction technology turned on by default. Consumers can disable the feature if they want.

With built-in templates, consumers can turn plain paper into college-ruled, wide-ruled or graph paper. The printers also include templates for creating greeting cards, calendars and other photo novelties. The Artisans also support printing onto inkjet printable optical media.

The units offer print/copy speeds of up to 38 ppm and 4-inch by 6-inch photo printing in 10 seconds.

The Artisan 800, for $299, features built-in Wi-Fi and Ethernet networking, fax, an automatic document feeder and is controlled through a 7.8-inch touchpanel. It can display images on a 3.5-inch LCD within the panel. It features 4,800-dpi scanning.

The $199 Artisan 700 loses the touch-panel and instead features a 2.5-inch LCD. It offers 2,400-dpi resolution scanning.

The new WorkForce brand will appear on two new all-in-ones and two single-function printers geared toward businesses of five or fewer employees, home-based workers and freelancers.

All the new printers will offer double-sided printing, individual ink tanks, Energy Star compliance and the company's DX3 micro piezo print head. They will produce photos at 5,760 by 1,440 dpi.

The WorkForce 600 all-in-one, for $199, features 27 ppm black-text printing, 19 ppm color printing and built-in Wi-Fi and wired networking. It is compatible with a high-capacity black ink cartridge.

The unit also sports a 2.5 tilting LCD display, 30 page automatic document feeder, fax capability and will include a two year limited warranty. Registered users will receive free lifetime phone support.

The $129 WorkForce 500 offers most of the features of the 600 but loses the wireless/wired networking and clocks in at 33 ppm in black and color.

The WorkForce 40, for $129, ships in September. It features built-in wireless/wired networking, 27 ppm black text print speeds and 19 ppm in color.

The $69.99 WorkForce 30 loses the networking features and offers color text print speeds of 11 ppm. It can accept a second black ink cartridge.

Epson will also ship a new scanner to dealers this month.

The Perfection V300 Photo features a hardware resolution of 4,800 by 9,600 dpi with 48-bit color and a dynamic range of 3.2.

The $99 unit can scan three-dimensional objects thanks to a 180-degree lid and offers dedicated buttons for automatically scanning, copying, emailing or creating a PDF of scanned images and documents.

The V300 incorporates Epson's Easy Photo Fix image-correction technology and a power-saving LED light source.

New for the V300 is an office mode in the Easy Photo Fix software for improving the look of scanned documents. It will feature a built-in transparency for scanning negatives.

Finally, Epson refreshed its line of high-end photo viewers.

The P-6000 and P-7000 will use new LCD technology, dubbed Photo Fine Premia, which offers 94 percent of the Adobe RGB color gamut, Epson said. The 4-inch screens will offer VGA resolution and be joined by a new jog dial for scrolling through images, and built-in slots for SD and CF cards (including UDMA-enabled cards).

The firm boosted image download speeds by 35 percent over previous models. The image viewers support JPEG and RAW image files, alongside audio and video files.

The 80GB P-6000 will retail for $599. The 160GB P-7000 will retail for $799 and will also bundle a travel pack. Both are due in stores this month.