Epson SureColor P700 13″ Photo Printer

WARNING: Be aware Epson ships the P700 with partially filled ink cartridges (about 15% full).

I’ve been using Epson printers professionally for over 20 years and even worked as a Sales Rep for them and I can now say with all honesty that they are a junk and a deliberate ripoff on Epson’s part.

If your workflow is to print several days a week it may not be a problem, but if, like me and probably most people, you’ll need to print every few weeks these printers are absolutely useless. You can plan on “cleaning the heads” several times before you may be lucky enough to print, and each “cleaning” will waste several dollars and several minutes of your time. Chances are it won’t help and you’ll need to wait until the following day and try again –which sometimes resolves the issue but more often than not won’t. You’ll find yourself, as I often do, wasting hours and days and $40-50 in Epson ink just to do a print or two. That is absolutely not worth it, no matter how good the final print may be.

Epson sells these printers at a loss and makes up for it with a scheme to force-waste enormous quantities of their ink, costing you money and time. That is simply their business model. Don’t fall for it.

Unlike the P600, this printer is not usable in a professional setting until Epson releases a firmware update that allows the low ink warnings to be turned off.

If you have low ink (15% or less is considered “low”) the P700 requires you to intervene and press OK twice to bypass the low ink warning before any job will print. You either have to do this for every single job, or throw away the last 10-15% of every $500+ set of ink.

Epson support says this is a “feature” to stop you accidentally running out of ink. Except, unlike the previous generation P600 and most other printers, this “feature” cannot be turned off. Epson is forcing customers to choose between babysitting the printer and constantly pressing OK, or wasting a ton of good ink. No thanks.

It prints beautifully, but that doesn’t matter if I have to sit next to it and repeatedly press OK, so it’s being returned.

DO NOT buy this printer if you plan on making more than a few prints a week. I am a full-time artist and decided to transition from having a professional make my prints to making my own at home. This printer makes beautiful prints, but unfortunately it requires you to hand feed each piece of paper if you want to print on anything other than regular letter paper. I even bought the thinnest, most lightweight fine art paper and it still requires me to hand feed the paper. It has a “thick paper” setting but you REALLY have to fiddle with it to get it to accept each sheet. It requires a learned finessing. Pretty much every time it will say “out of paper” and then restart the entire process. Even more annoyingly, it will frequently say “paper jam” once the paper does feed, and then takes almost a whole minute to recover. I spoke with several different people at tech support and they just said that this printer can’t really handle thick paper, which is unfortunate because if you’re going to spend this much on a printer that has 10 ink cartridges and prints with such precision, you definitely want to print on good paper. For months I have been spending hours every week babysitting the printer and getting it to print. There are times when it simply will not accept paper at all. Really disappointed.

Pros: Takes that piece of paper and positions itself inside the machine so you don’t have to worry about getting it right. I was worried because I want to make waterproof labels on this machine.
Quality of ink is amazing. Matte black and shiny black ink cartridges. Has a separate violet ink cartridge. I printed out a sample and left it under a bright window for weeks. Quality stayed bright. I’m a newbie so I don’t know enough about the machine other to advise watching the videos on Youtube. I bought this strictly for label making but now I want to make banners and photos for my business.
Cons: Expensive. This machine uses about 80% of the first load of ink and sends it right to the trash bin. The company even sends you an extra trash bin because they know it’s going to fill up the first one. $350 dollars worth of ink straight into the trash in the first few minutes of turning it on. I hear it’s a software issue but I have to buy another $400 dollars worth of ink now because after turning in on and putting the ink in it is near empty. Really sucks but I don’t think this company is going to fix this issue anytime soon or even attempt any kind of reimbursement so be prepared to buy $800 dollars worth of ink when you purchase the printer. If I had known about the ink issue I would have purchased something else. I gave it 4 stars because this company needs to update it’s software or fix the issue. Printer is sexy hot looking – 5 stars. I give the quality of the ink 10 stars. You can’t go wrong with pigment ink.

This is my first professional quality printer. I had been contemplating purchasing a P600, P800, or canon proGraf for months when I saw the announcement for the new P700 and P900. I’m very glad I waited. I was impressed with the ease of setup. Installing the requisite software was painless, as was connecting the printer to my wi-fi, which in my case was my iPad hotspot which can be problematic for other devices. I was amazed at the fact that with a modicum of training in Lightroom, I was able to produce prints that are surprisingly close to being an exact match to what is on my screen. Long story short, if an amateur such as myself can produce prints which exceed expectations, I’m certain any professional will blown away with the output of this printer. I look forward to finally producing high quality prints after years of only enjoying my (expensive) hobby onscreen.

I had a local printer doing my prints. And he’ll still have to do the large ones. But I am delighted with the quality of prints I’m getting out of this. I’m new to the whole photography art world, so figuring out the settings to a little trial & error for me. But I’m learning & getting gorgeous prints from this printer. And my only regret is that I didn’t go ahead and buy the bigger printer.
When I first started using this printer it left a smudge on the white boarder of the prints. It stopped doing it after a few prints without me having to do anything. But it was disappointing at first.
The ink almost immediately says it is very low. I have a whole new set ready to go. But the cartridges keep going…. *update – it will eventually tell you that you have to replace an individual ink to proceed, so that’s when you need to change it.
I use Moab Entrada Rag Bright 300 cotton paper.
I print directly from photoshop. I’ve had zero problems with crashing & needing to restart like another review said. But I also own a nicer Epson flatbed scanner. I have to use non-Epson scanning softwear because it would crash all the time & I’d have to restart it. So maybe Epson just has crappy softwear?
The only thing I don’t love about this printer is that it is bad at doing multiple pages. It doesn’t bend the paper while it is going through the printer, which is great! I was able to print the backs of some postcards for marketing material for me. But I had to individually initiate each print….

Brand new and had to be replaced because it stopped printing.

No surprise this printer outputs really nice photo prints but the firmware is really buggy. My printer routinely crashes requiring a reboot, and sometimes doesn’t respond when sent a print job forcing me to power/on off to get it to respond to the print job. I’m on a solid Wi-Fi network using the latest drivers, I expect better from the brand especially given the cost of the printer.

The provided ink cartridges are starters. After you complete the setup of the printer, they’re all almost out of ink. So, when considering the price of this printer realize you need to also purchase a few hundred dollars’ worth of print cartridges along with it.

I bought the P700 to replace the Surecolor P600, which had worked well for 4 years with the exception of the thick paper feeder (I use Epson Velvet as my primary paper), which was bad at the start and continued to get worse. I assumed, since after numerous calls with Epson each support they were aware off the paper loading issue, that the P700 would be one generation better.