It’s a rarity for us to get excited about printers, but Epson’s new Artisan 800 and Artisan 700 are two of the slickest feature rich all-in-one printers we’ve seen in a long time. For starters, both the 700 and 800 are sporting a lovely piano black finish that makes them look good enough to be left in your living room if need be. Looks aside, the Artisan 800 features Wifi, an Automatic Document Feeder (ADF), and Ultra Hi-Definition photos. But what makes the 800 really stand out of the pack is its 7.8″ smart touch panel  that lights up only the buttons necessary. For example, when faxing a document – you’ll only see the buttons related to Faxing. You can also use the touchscreen for selecting, copying, enlarging, rotating, cropping, and printing photos all without a computer. Another cool feature of the Artisan 800 is its ability to turn photos or drawings into personalized coloring book pages and make personal notepaper with a photo as a background. Also, both the 700 and 800 can print and copy images directly onto ink jet printable CDs and DVDs – which is just one of the reasons we’re crazy about Epson’s printers. Both printers are also pretty speedy – they can print up to 38 pages per minute (ppm), 4” x 6” photos in as fast as 10 seconds, and an 8” x 10” in as fast as 50 seconds.
Both models also feature memory card readers, the ability to automatically restore faded photos, both come with software for creating and printing personalized CDs/DVDs, greeting cards, elegant invitations, photo calendars, photo books, and more, and both printers also feature six-color Ultra Hi-Definition Claria ink to create “vivid, true-to-life photos with smudge, scratch and water resistance”. FInally, both the 800 and 700 support wifi and ethernet networking.
Unfortunately, the Artisan 700 doesn’t sport the full featured Fax like the 800 does, but it’s compact size of just 5.9″ tall height makes it highly desirable for other reasons. The Artisan 800 will retail for $299 and the 700 for $199. They are both currently available for preorder at Amazon and should be available in September.