The set up procedure involves installing the ink cartridges, plug the printer into the computer and grounded AC outlet, and installing the drivers. Once that's done, you must choose the printer from the chooser, and begin printing.

The first thing you will unfortunately notice when using this printer is how noisy it is. I have used many Epson printers before, and this is one of the noisiest. But once you get past this annoyance, you have yourself a good printer. The size of this thing is just amazing. It's one of the smallest non-portable inkjets I have ever seen. Along with the small size, the rounded shape fits right in with a G4 or iMac. The color of the cover is graphite, to match G4s and the graphite iMacs; and its sister printer the 777i has an indigo cover to match many of the iMacs.

This compact design also keeps dust out. One of the biggest enemies to ink jet printers is dust bunnies. Those little things get inside the print heads and cause havoc. But this printer seems to be build tight, to keep out as much dust as possible. However, as with any ink jet printer, I suggest a $6 investment called a dust cover, that can save you twenty times that much.

The next big thing you will notice is how fast this puppy prints. Full pages of text can be spit out at 7.5 seconds a piece. Graphics of course will cause it to slow down, but not much. A full page graphic can be printed in only 15 seconds, and a 4x6 photo can be printed in under a minute. This printer definitely delivers alot of bang for the buck.

But your dollar won't stretch too far when you start to run out of ink. Currently, third party ink manufacturers haven't started making cartridges for this printer, so you have to buy the genuine Epson cartridges. With black carts starting at about $26, and color at $22, your 400-500 pages per cartridge will start costing a small fortune, depending on how much you print. However, as soon as those third party companies start latching onto this printer, you will only be spending about a third of that price.

With the current expense of printing, you will want to keep the ink usage down; printing at 360 dpi whenever possible. Luckily, the 4 picoliter droplets produce crisp texts, and decent graphics at that resolution. But if you want good looking photographs, you will have to use one of the higher resolution settings. This will waste more ink, but will sharpen up your images unimaginably.

When comparing the printouts to laser printers and photographs, the Stylus 777 produced high quality prints. There was no noticeable difference in the text between this and a laser printer. Everything was crisp, and there was no spreading or smudging. Photos turned out pretty good, but not equal to the quality of the Stylus Photo series of printers. You will get good photographs out of this, but if you want great, you will have to spend more money on a printer devoted to photos.

The driver software for this printer almost seems like it's dumbed down from previous Stylus printers. Everything just seems so simple, but it is aimed at consumers on a budget, and those are normally the ones who aren't technophiles. The drivers and software work fine, but I would like them to be easier to read, include more options, and maybe a few more visual cues when changing options.

Another pet peeve I have with this printer is the way the lights work. On every other Epson printer I have used, there was a light for power, paper, black ink, and color ink, which made it very easy to decipher what they meant. With this printer, there are three lights, power, ink low, and paper. You have to watch in what order, and at what speed the lights blink, just to see what they really mean. A big pain in the butt!

Finally, one thing that Epson almost always boasts is both Mac and PC connectivity. The same thing goes for this printer. It has both USB and Parallel ports for easy hookup on either platform. This is great for those of us that use both platforms, and don't want extra printers laying around, collecting dust.

No problems were encountered while using this printer.

While the ink cartridges may be expensive right now, they will surely drop when third party companies start to manufacture them. That means that this low cost printer, will stay a low cost printer, producing great printouts, at break-neck speeds.

Pros	Cons
Great text and graphic printouts USB connectivity Very fast printouts Small footprint Inexpensive Mac/PC compatible	Very Noisy Ink is consumed quite rapidly Not superb photo printouts Status lights are hard to decipher Software is "dumbed down"
7/10 stars