Epson 340 Printer

I just purchased the Epson R340 printer and have tried out a few prints.

here’s what i’ve found so far.

At first I didn’t actually set it up directly to a computer but used the print direct from memory card feature. I’m using a Compact Flash card (it also supports memory sticks, and SD cards) and was pretty impressed that it was able to find all the images which were intermixed with other files on the card. (although i need to check exactly how it is doing that. if it is simply looking for file extensions, then it could leave the printer open to malicious software).

When printing from the card, the printer display allows for basic manipulation of the photography – cropping to 4 preset sizes, positioning,

The print outs were great. I used both staples’ glossy photo paper and epson’s glossy paper. The print outs on both were impressive, but the one’s on epson’s paper were phenomenal. I also tried printing with variable outputs – the printer allows for standard, high, or highest. I could not tell the difference between high or highest. not sure if that is a plus or not, and maybe it just because i don’t have a enough of a discerning eye.

Printing directly from my computer was easy enough. Simply load the drivers and plug the printer in. what was interesting is that the printer was also viewed as a hard drive if a card was in the printer, so you can transfer files from you computer to the card for later printing – only useful if for some reason, you can not interface with the card directly on your laptop (in my case i’ve misplaced my PCMIA card, so can’t access my compact flash card on my laptop).

so next, I printed via bluetooth. the printer does not have bluetooth built in, but it does have the generic drivers, so you can use a bluetooth-usb adapter. They recommend using the epson one (for obious biased reasons), but I plugged an old belkin adapter that i had lying around and it worked no problem. After plugging it in, the display asked me to enter some basic info such as a passcode and viola! it was done.

the first thing i printed was a picture from my sony-ericsson p900 (yeah, yeah, i know its old as hell…but it does the job!) and because the p900 doesn’t have print software, i had to make do with just pairing with the printer and then transfering the pic to be printed.

Using my laptop, I was able to link and specify that the new pairing was for a printer, and so i had no problems at all printing directly from applications on my laptop.

there were some short-comings though

all in all though, a great purchase for only $149 CDN

***UPDATE***
I’ve noticed a lot of people searching for the epson 340 lately. Was this helpful? what other info would be useful?