The Epson Expression Photo XP-8800 Wireless Color All-in-One printer, Epson’s replacement for the Epson XP-8700, stands out for both its high-quality photo output and its long list of features. Built around a six-color ink system that helps boost photo quality, it offers a flatbed for scanning and copying, supports mobile printing, and can print directly on appropriately surfaced discs. It also has a 4.3-inch color touch screen to give commands, automatically extends the output tray from its closed position if needed when you start a print job, and asks if you want to retract it when you power down. At $299.99, it’s a little pricey, but it offers enough to make it our new Editors’ Choice pick for families who need a light-duty home printer that can also print high-quality photos.
Design: Lots of Hidden Features
The XP-8800 is easily small enough to find room for, at only 5.6 by 13.7 by 13.4 inches (HWD) with the output tray closed, and it weighs only 14.6 pounds, which makes it easy to move into place. The output tray opens to the front, extending an additional 7 inches. Setup is standard for a cartridge-based inkjet, using an automated setup routine you download from Epson’s website. For my tests, I connected the printer to our testbed PC by USB, the only wired connection option. However, Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi Direct are also connection possibilities.
Printhead alignment is automatic, which is particularly welcome for a printer with six ink cartridges. The automated setup routine stepped through the entire process without problems in my tests, including printing an alignment page at the end and instructing me to place it on the flatbed so it could scan the image, analyze the results, and adjust the printhead settings as appropriate.
(Credit: M. David Stone)
You can also print from mobile devices. Epson offers apps for both iOS and Android that can print via your network, assuming the printer and device are both connected to it, or can print directly to the printer via Wi-Fi Direct. You can also print from and scan to USB memory keys and SD cards, although it’s easy to miss the USB port and card slot. Both are on the front panel, near the bottom left, when facing the printer. However, they’re hidden when the paper-tray cover and front panel that holds the touch screen are closed, as well as from some angles, even when the covers are open. And depending on the lighting, they can get lost in the shadows, due to the black color of the printer itself. Once you find them, plugging in a card or USB key will bring up a self-explanatory menu (for scanning and printing) on the touch screen.
(Credit: M. David Stone)
Another hidden feature is the tray for holding a printable disc. When not in use, it sits in a slot on the underside of the main paper tray, so if you don’t already know where to look for it, you might use the printer for years and never notice it. If you want to print labels on printable discs, be sure to read the manual to find out where the tray is and how to use it. Once you’ve learned how, you’ll appreciate the supplied Photo+ app’s ability to design disc labels easily and print them.
(Credit: M. David Stone)
Paper handling for printing is flexible but strictly light-duty. The main tray at the bottom front of the printer can hold 100 sheets of up to legal-size paper. It also supports automatic duplexing (two-sided printing), which worked without problems in my tests for letter-size paper. However, it doesn’t support automatic duplexing for legal-size paper. A second tray just above it lets you load up to 20 sheets of Epson’s Premium Photo Paper Glossy, so you can keep both photo paper and plain paper loaded at all times rather than having to switch back and forth between the two. The photo tray can handle sizes from 3.5 by 5 inches to 5 by 7 inches, as well as the wide-format 4 by 7.1 inches (for printing at a 16:9 aspect ratio). In addition, the XP-8800 has a manual feed slot at the back of the printer’s top panel that can accept paper up to 8.5 inches wide by 47.2 inches long. Both the main tray and the manual feed slot can handle either plain paper or photo paper.
Epson doesn’t offer a recommended maximum number of pages per month, but if you want to keep refills of plain paper down to once a week, the 100-page capacity translates to about 400 per month, which should be enough for most home printing needs. For scanning, the printer offers an 8.5-by-11.7-inch flatbed only, which means you can scan only one page at a time and no larger than letter or A4 size.
(Credit: M. David Stone)
As is typical for cartridge-based inkjets, particularly for photo-centric models, the running cost for the XP-8800 is relatively high. Based on prices and rated yields as given on Epson’s website, the cost per page (cpp) is 4 cents per mono page and 17.8 cents per standard color page when using the high-capacity cartridges and somewhat higher for the standard cartridges. Keep in mind that these running costs are based on a standard set of text and graphics pages. They have little to no relevance to the cost for printing photos.
Testing the XP-8800: Impressive Photos, Good Graphics, Pretty Good Text
To judge the XP-8800’s performance in the appropriate context, I compared it with three other photo-centric all-in-one printers aimed at home users: the Epson Expression Photo XP-970, the Epson EcoTank Photo ET-8550, and the Canon Pixma TS9521C Crafter’s All-in-One. (The Canon model we tested is discontinued, but Canon says the current TS9521Ca is the identical printer minus the Bluetooth Low Energy support that was used strictly as one option for initial setup.)
For printing our Microsoft Word text file, the XP-8800 was barely enough faster than the XP-970 to qualify for third place instead of being tied for last.
Meanwhile, on our full business-applications suite (which adds PDF, Excel, and PowerPoint files), the XP-8800 came in second overall. The ET-8550 was the fastest for both the Word file and the full suite, at 202 seconds (3 minutes and 22 seconds) for the suite, or 1 minute and 51 seconds faster than the XP-8800.
Of course, with these printers, our photo printing tests using photo paper are potentially more significant than our business suite using plain paper. On the photo tests, the average time for 4-by-6-inch photos was 23 seconds for the first-place TS9521C, compared with 29 seconds for the second-place XP-8800. The XP-970 was a close third, and the ET-8550 was a convincing fourth. In short, the XP-8800 offers a respectable photo print time for a photo-centric printer.
Photo output quality in our tests, using the supplied Epson Photo Paper Glossy, was a match for a professional photo lab. Shadow detail and highlights held well, and I saw no hint of dithering, posterization (shading changing suddenly where it should change gradually), or other common issues. That said, note that scanning a photo and printing it resulted in only a minor loss in color saturation and fine detail, while copying the same photo in one step degraded the photo quality much more significantly. In the copied version, I saw obvious color shifts and loss of both shadow detail and highlights. So, if you want to copy a photo, it’s best to do so by scanning it to a file first and then printing the file.
Graphics output in our official tests using default settings and plain paper was good but not in the same class as photo output. I saw no visible dithering and no posterization, even in the images that tend to show these problems. Still, colors were more in the range of pastels rather than being vibrant and nicely saturated. I also saw some banding in dark solid fills; it looked like sweeps of the printhead probably caused the bands, but they were subtle enough that you could miss them if you were not looking closely. Thin lines generally held well, although in our line graph with a black background, the thinnest line didn’t stand out as well as it should. Some additional ad hoc testing with Epson’s glossy photo paper and matte presentation paper confirmed that graphics output with the right paper offers the same high level of quality that I saw with photos, adding vibrant color in particular.
(Credit: M. David Stone)
Text quality on plain paper is best described as good enough for most purposes. All the fonts you’d use in a business document were easily readable at 6 points, and some were just as readable at 5 points. Still, a look through a loupe showed that even those that were readable at 5 points had a tendency to have ragged edges or be poorly formed, with adjacent characters bleeding into each other and a lowercase “e” in some fonts looking more like an “o” with a horizontal line across the middle. Even at 10 and 12 points, the characters in most fonts looked just a little less crisp than they should. One of the two stylized fonts with heavy strokes in our tests was readable but not well-formed, even at 12 points. The one that’s easier to render well hit that bar at 8 points.
On our ink-smudge tests using plain paper, black text showed smudging with water but was still readable. It didn’t smudge at all under our highlighter pen. Color inks in graphics on plain paper resisted smudging from water, but the pages were left with water stains. The same was true for color inks on the supplied photo paper.
Verdict: A Compelling Choice for Printing Photos at Home
All of the printers mentioned here deliver superb photo output. The trick is to pick the one that matches your other needs as well. Two key differences among the XP-8800 and the other three are that each of the others adds Ethernet as a connection choice, and each one can print on larger paper than the XP-8800 can.
The XP-970 is similar in most ways to the XP-8800 on features and performance, but it can accept single sheets of 11-by-17-inch paper in its rear slot for borderless prints, making it the obvious alternative if you need to print large once in a while, or even if you just want an Ethernet connection. The TS9521Ca is a close competitor to the XP-970. But although you can load more than one 11-by-17-inch sheet in its rear tray (the number depends on the paper type), it doesn’t offer borderless printing for anything larger than letter size.
(Credit: M. David Stone)
The ET-8550, one of our top picks for photo-centric printers, is the only printer mentioned here that can handle up to 13-by-19-inch paper, and it can hold up to five sheets of photo paper at that size. It’s the most expensive printer in this group, but because it uses ink tanks rather than cartridges, you can save enough on ink, if you print enough, to make up for its higher initial price. It’s the obvious choice if you need to print at 13 by 19 inches or if you print enough pages to benefit from the low running cost.
All that said, if you don’t print enough to save money by getting a tank-based printer, don’t need to print at larger than legal size, and don’t need Ethernet, the XP-8800 is hard to beat for great-looking photos. That’s enough to make it our new Editors’ Choice winner for light-duty photo-centric printers for printing on up to legal-size paper.
Epson Expression Photo XP-8800 Wireless Color All-in-One
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The Bottom Line
High-quality photo output—plus the ability to scan, copy, and print on discs—makes the Epson XP-8800 a solid choice for printing photos at home.
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About M. David Stone
Contributing Editor
