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Epson Stylus SX400

Posted on 10/27/2009 at 4:39:34 AM

Designed of those on a budget the Epson Stylus is anything but a budget printer is terms of it performance (on paper at least). It offers printing, scanning and copying facilities with some impressive performance figures. Most of these figures covert into impressive performance in the real world, some however do not. The print quality produced be the SX400 is excellent for all types of documents from text to photos and it performs well on a variety of different types of media. Printing speed however if less than impressive and not surprisingly it is much slower than the official figure of 34 pages per minute (which is ridiculous claim), the best our SX400 could manage was 10ppm and even then the draft print quality was not acceptable by anyone’s standard. This lack of speed was not due to the machine we tested being faulty, Epson have been known in the past for greatly exaggerated claims when it comes to the speed of their printers and the SX400 is no exception. The scanner has no such problems with it speed and the quality is also of a good standard with an impressive maximum resolution of 1200dpi. The photo copier makes use of the same A4 flatbed scanner and produces copies with a reasonable speed and accuracy. The SX400 uses a different kind of printer ink cartridges setup to its competitors which Epson claim is more economic, it consists of each of the four colour ink cartridges having its own cartridges and therefore only the colours that get used need to be replaced and the remaining ink is unaffected and doesn’t get wasted. While this may save money in the long run a set of Epson SX400 ink cartridges still costs over £30 which is average for OEM inks for a printer in this category its still not cheap. There are cheaper compatible Epson ink cartridges available from third party manufacturers and they offer the same print yields for half the price.