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(More customer reviews)I bought this printer from Amazon for under 100 dollars, no tax, no shipping. Here's what I got: an excellent photo quality printer, copier, scanner, pdf creator and fax machine with auto-feeder. I am baffled by the people who post one or two stars about this machine. Go to any store and you can hardly buy any printer, any copier, any scanner, any fax machine, or any pdf creator software for 100 bucks, and this unit has them all built into one nice looking box. There is also a very capable OCR application.
I am very tired of hearing how much ink costs. A printer should not be measured by the price of ink but strictly by how much it costs to print each page, and Epson tends to be at the low end of the spectrum. I also don't care how much ink is left in the tank or if it has a chip, again the issue is how much a page will cost me. I do not work for or represent Epson, and hope to point out the negatives as well as the positives. I own 3 Epson printers and 4 HP printers. I don't own Canon or Brother because at the lower end of the spectrum I think their products are very cheesy. Let's talk about the CX9400Fax. I doubt if a better value exists anywhere near the price range. My experience is that individual tanks are the better choice but I'm not sure it really makes a huge difference.
Don't even think of rating a printer by how "fast" it is, with inkjets that spec is a ridiculous fantasy ... there is just no such thing as 32 pages a minute in real life! I have to admit I was pleasantly surprised how much faster this unit was than just one generation ago. In photo mode I would estimate real-life printing to be four times faster than the CX7400 and at least as good, if not better. Epson has always excelled is photo quality and the CX9400Fax is no exception. As a fax machine it is adequate for home office use and the small number of faxes people send from home. Same with it being a copier and scanner, for the price it does a good job. It seems built a little sturdier than most competitive models. It sounds, well, like a printer. I don't know how anyone could expect a mechanical device to be totally silent. Ease of use is pretty close to flawless.
Here's a couple of "secrets" that address concerns some of the other reviewers had. First, if you think the printer is running out of ink too often and you swear you don't print that much, you are probably right. Epson, like some other manufacturers, has to prime the heads every time you turn the printer on, which uses ink. That costs money and I wish there was a better way. But, simple solution, leave the printer on 24/7. There is no logical reason to turn it off between each use , especially if you are using it as a fax machine, since it automatically goes in to a sleep mode. Another well documented Epson feature is that you can force it to print using only black ink. There are a lot of reviewers who say they ran out of all colors when they think they only printed in black and white. While they may be right, it's hard to blame Epson. The manufacturer clearly has a "black" only setting in the print options, plus they offer a high-capacity black tank for those who do a lot of text printing.
It is important to note that if you want to fax from a document that is on your computer you need to have the CX9400Fax connected to a phone line, just like any fax machine. It won't magically send a fax through your internet connection. There are ways you can do that but not with a traditional fax machine.
So, what is the image quality? In "draft" mode it is marginal but that's what draft mode means. Draft mode is not intended for quality printing, just to quickly print a document that you intend to throw out.
As you increase the quality settings, the Epson magic sets in. Normal mode is as good as any printer on the shelf. Photo mode is almost as good as it gets. The highest quality modes are marginally better, you have to have a fine eye to tell the difference, but the real story is that it is very hard to beat an Epson photo when printed at the best modes with the highest grade papers.Moral? If you print in draft mode and expect high quality you are seriously fooling yourself.
The final observation is that many people complain that a set of ink tanks cost as much as the printer or that printer manufacturers don't include an USB cable. Those complaints just can't be taken seriously. Can you remember paying over $500 for an inkjet printer only 10 years ago and how badly it printed? We have demanded that our consumer electronics be made by cheap labor in China, which has brought hardware prices down to a cost almost equal to the cost of materials. 100 bucks for a machine that does as much as the CX9400Fax is ridiculously low! Sure, it may be a throwaway, but that's what people want. The USB cable issue is even funnier. How many USB cables does the average person own? The percentage of people buying a printer who have never bought a printer before is near zero. And if you seriously don't have a USB cable you can find one for a buck-and-a-half right here at Amazon. And complaints about ink costs? They have stayed the same for many years. When you buy a car you need to fill it with gas, when you buy a printer you need to fill it with ink. It's what you choose to do. Gas prices have risen a lot more than inkjet prices.
My final somewhat negative comment about this printer as well as most competitive brands, is that they just try to do too much. Yes, I want a printer/scanner/fax/copier but the media card slots and LCD screens are overkill. Fine if you want them but I believe most people know how they can do the same thing and more directly from their computer.
MORE: read this carefully
After a few weeks of owning this printer, using it daily to print normal business documents, the ink level had hardly moved. Then one day the repair people were here to check the air conditioner and turned the power off for a few minutes. Ok, it wasn't a surprise to me because I know that printers need to "charge" when powered up, but when the power came back on a full 20% of the ink was used to prime the printer when if turned it back on. I have to repeat what I said in my review, NEVER turn this machine off, it uses almost zero power when in standby and I guarantee that if you turn it off every day you will use a ton of ink needlessly like so many reviewers report. After the power off incident, I am back to printing lots of normal documents each day and the ink indicator hasn't even moved. Verdict? It's not the printer's fault that some people go through a lot of ink, it's because they didn't read the instructions.
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Epson Stylus CX9400Fax Color All-in-One PrinterThe Epson Stylus CX9400 Color All-in-One printer makes it easy to print, copy, scan, fax, and even print photos PC-free, all with one easy-to-use machine. Tackle important business and personal projects with this sophisticated printer that features a high-speed fax that is able to handle multi-page documents through its Automatic Document Feeder. Creating color copies is also faster than ever, and the printer makes it easy to reduce or enlarge images before selecting and printing photos with a maximum 5760 by 1440 dpi. These photos can be previewed and printed PC-free from digital cameras or memory cards via a 2.5-inch tilt LCD and multipurpose card slot. Use the Optical Character Recognition scanning software included with the printer to transform pages from books and magazines into editable text, and print using one standard ink set for both documents and photos. Best of all, documents printed on the Stylus CX9400 resist fading up to six times longer than other printing machines.
Other great features--including one-touch color and black-and-white copying, high-quality scanning, and individual replaceable ink cartridges that are smudge, fade, and water resistant--make this streamlined 18.1 by 18.9 by 10.6 inch printer amazingly versatile, easy to use, and able to produce great results in little time.
What's in the Box CX9400Fax ink jet all-in-one, 69 black ink cartridge (T069120), 69 cyan ink cartridge (T069220), 69 magenta ink cartridge (T069320), 69 yellow ink cartridge (T069420), documentation, CD-ROM (drivers and software), phone cable, and power cable.
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