Epson Artisan 835

Imagination Meets Innovation.

Unsurpassed in image quality and preferred over all competitors by consumers¹, the Artisan 835 has a smart 7.8" touch panel and the world's fastest 4" x 6" photo print speeds¹, making it easy to let your creativity soar. Built to keep up with your busy life, this powerful performer prints Ultra Hi-Definition 4" x 6" photos in as fast as 10 seconds¹ without sacrificing quality. And, it's also fast for everyday projects, with ISO print speeds of 9.5 ISO ppm (black) and 9 ISO ppm (color)¹.

Model: C11CA73201
5-in-1 with Wi-Fi®: Print / Copy / Scan / Fax / Photo
Ink: 6-color Claria® Hi-Definition dye ink
ISO Print Speed: Black: 9.5 ISO ppm¹; Color: 9 ISO ppm

The Artisan 835 replaces the Artisan 810, an earlier-generation $300 AIO designed and marketed with the Swiss-Army-knife approach of piling on features and offering the lot at a premium price. The two devices—the new and the old—are encased in identical-looking shiny black plastic and have the signature Epson left-to-right slope across the top, accentuating the automatic document feeder and breaking up the otherwise block-like shape. Unlike Canon’s new $299 high-end photo AIO, the Pixma MG8120, with its redesigned exterior and futuristic control panel, the Artisan 835 uses essentially the same tilt-up, 7.8-inch touch panel as its predecessor. (It’s spacious and functional, if a bit stodgy.) It’s also a little bigger than most consumer AIOs, especially from front to back. An external duplexer, the device that pulls pages back and flips them over for two-sided printing without your intervention, extends several inches from the back, giving the printer an odd shape and making it take up a little more desk space than other AIOs. On the upside, you can connect to it wirelessly, so you can place it just about anywhere. At 25 pounds, this Artisan is a bit heavy due to the big feature load. The duplexer, the document feeder, and a CD-printing mechanism are, in effect, little machines themselves and bring their own payloads. The extra weight also makes the printer feel durable

The Epson Artisan 835 features a tilt-up, 7.8-inch touch panel LCD to control its interface.

 
Unlike many AIOs, this device doesn’t have a rear paper tray. Instead, it has a 120-sheet tray that slides into the front of the machine beneath the output tray. The paper tray has an attachment that holds 20 sheets of photo paper. This arrangement makes paper handling a little awkward; you have to lift the tiny 30-page output tray out of the way to get the input tray in and out, then slide your document paper in under the photo-paper tray. There’s no convenient way to feed the device the occasional Quicken check, label sheet, or other specialty paper that we all need to print to now and then.
The Artisan 835 uses Epson’s six-cartridge Claria Hi-Definition ink-technology system. In addition to the standard cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (CMYK) process-color inks, the system includes light-cyan and light-magenta cartridges to expand the printable color range and enrich the overall color depth. Rather than loading the cartridges into a sliding print-head carriage like most other inkjets, the Artisan 835 has a conveniently located ink compartment in the front-right corner of the device. Ink is injected to the print head through hoses—a somewhat uncommon configuration, but not markedly more convenient than the conventional system.
Considering everything it does, setting up the Artisan 835 is a straightforward and painless 10-minute process. The LCD walks you through installing the ink cartridges and connecting the device to your wireless network. If you know the network password, the instructions and pictures make the procedure foolproof, even if you’ve never set up a printer before. The only time we looked at the setup guide was to figure out how to use the two-tiered paper tray, which is somewhat flimsy and, without diagrams and instructions, a bit of a puzzle. (That said, once you get it loaded the first time, you should have it mastered.) You can expand the tray to hold 8x14-inch legal-size paper to print or copy legal documents, a feature not supported on many AIOs.

Although it looks a bit stodgy, the Artisan 835's interface is easy to use.

You can get to nearly every function from the contextual touch-control panel. The panel is intuitive and easy to use, but the home screen’s tan-colored buttons and the bright-yellow labeling throughout are somewhat homely and plain-looking, an overall lackluster design screaming for an upgrade. This doesn’t affect ease of use, performance, or functionality, however—the control panel does its job despite the uninspiring interface. Scanning, copying, selecting, correcting, laying, out, and printing photographs is easy, the LCD walking you through each process. You won’t have to exert a single brain cell to figure out what to do next.
The bundled CD contains Epson’s standard software bundle for enhancing, correcting, organizing photos, as well as a scanning program, and a better-than-average OCR application, Abbyy FineReader Sprint, for converting scanned text to editable text documents. Abbyy FineReader Sprint saves in multiple formats, such as Word and PDF, and in our tests, it didn't make many mistakes. When converting our sample text documents, it didn’t convert a single character incorrectly, which is performance we have not seen from most other OCR programs.
Printing documents during our tests went mostly as expected, except that in Draft mode the sheets get pushed out a bit too forcefully and don’t stack properly in the output tray. Sometimes sheets slid out too far, and subsequent sheets slipped under them, mixing up the page order. Also, when we let the output tray overflow by just a sheet or two over its rather low 30-page limit, in any mode, we wound up picking up pages off the floor.
 

In addition to the standard cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK) process color inks, the system includes light cyan and light magenta cartridges to expand the printable color range and enrich the overall color depth.

 
The Artisan 835 showed some inconsistent times when printing documents, but it was overall an impressive performer. When printing our standard 20-page text-only test document in Draft mode, it blazed through the job in just 1 minute and 6 seconds, beating every other inkjet printer we have tested recently. When we switched to Fine mode printing the same document, however, its time of 9:19 was on par with printers closer to budget level. It stepped up its game again, though, when printing our 10-page test document of mixed text and graphics. At 4 minutes and 53 seconds in Fine mode, it scorched the competition. (No other device we’ve tested recently has been able to come in under 9 minutes on that test.) And if that’s not impressive enough, the Artisan 835 printed the same 10 pages in Draft mode in 24.3 seconds, more than four times faster than most of its competition.
The Artisan 835 had some trouble keeping up with its competition when it comes to photo printing, though. When printing our 4x6-inch test photo in Epson’s Photo mode, the equivalent to Canon’s Standard mode, the Artisan 835’s time of 20 seconds was within a second of Canon’s $199 Pixma MG6120 and $299 Pixma MG8120. At the highest-quality settings, however, the Artisan 835 fell way behind. On our 8.5x11-inch image, in Best mode, the Artisan 835’s print time of 2 minutes and 53 seconds was significantly slower than both Pixmas.
 

An external duplexer extends several inches from the back, giving the printer, making it take up a little more desk space than other AIOs.

Scan and copy speeds were excellent. It scanned our single-page text document in 10 seconds. That's faster than most other AIOs we’ve tested recently, including the Pixma MG8120’s 15.9 seconds.
Whether we had to wait long for it or not, the Artisan 835 continued to shine when we started to look at its output. The quality of our text and mixed-text-and-graphics test documents was excellent, even on cheap copy paper. The scan and copy functions worked as they should, and the results looked good. Our photographs looked excellent, in both Photo and Best modes. They were much more colorful and detailed than images printed on non-Artisan Epson AIO printers we’ve tested.
So, what will all these features and breakneck speeds cost you over time? Most of the inkjets we’ve looked at recently have high per-page costs, which we measure by calculating the cost of the ink required to print a single page. Printing monochrome documents on the Artisan 835 will cost you about 3.2 cents per page, which isn’t bad compared with some others in its price class. Epson offers only one size of black cartridge, however, so this is as good as it gets. Some other vendors offer pricier, optional "high-yield" black cartridges that deliver a lower cost per page than their standard cartridges do.
Epson does offer a high-yield option on its color ink tanks, but the payoff isn't what it should be. When you use the less expensive standard-yield color cartridges, color pages work out to about 13.4 cents per page, which is on the high side. Usually, you can save significantly by opting for a vendor's high-yield ink cartridges, but the Artisan 835’s high-capacity cartridges only reduce the cost per page from 13.4 to 13.1 cents—more of a token gesture than real savings. Keep in mind, though, that this high cost per page partly ties in with the number of ink tanks that the Artisan 835 uses. (It uses six, whereas most inkjets use four.) This is a sacrifice of cost for quality, and we feel like the Artisan 835's impressive output justifies the higher cost per page. (Read more about how we calculate cost per page.)
When we asked Epson who the Artisan 835 was designed for, the company said, “Busy moms with lots of projects for their children, their church, soccer teams, and so on.” Any mother who has enough projects to use all these features will certainly be busy. We maintain that just about any small or home business would benefit by having such a versatile machine at its disposal, too. It performs all of its options with quality results, reliably, and it does so without making you wait. The caveat: The high cost of its ink makes it less attractive the more you use it. That makes the Epson Artisan 835 most practical in settings that won’t need its services too frequently, or in households and small businesses willing to shell out for an AIO that continuously delivers everything they need.