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Entry-level price, but what about the performance?
Producing a printer for £40 is quite a feat.
Producing a combined printer-scanner for this amount is exceptional.
Epson’s
Stylus DX4400 may be a budget model but most of the essentials are in place,
including some extras not found in rival machines.
Coloured dark, slate grey with conventional, rounded styling, the device has a
simple control panel with just five buttons and three lights.
This is enough for all main functions, though, as the Stylus DX4400 doesn't have memory card slots for direct photo printing, nor does it have a USB port for connecting cameras. Up to 80 sheets of paper can be loaded into the rear tray and this feeds out to a tray at the front. The flatbed scanner adds very little extra height to the machine, which is generally impressively small.
Lifting the scanner section of the machine allows the user to clip the four pigment ink cartridges into place. It's unusual to have separate cartridges in a printer at this price and it helps keep the running costs down, as you can buy each cartridge as that colour runs out.
Having said that, the cheapest way to buy cartridges for the Stylus DX4400 is in a four-pack, which gives a cost per page of just over 2p for a black page and just under 5p for a colour one. Both these costs are good and mean that Epson isn't making up for the low purchase price by charging through the nose for consumables.
Where the machine isn't as hot is on print speed. A five-page text print took more than two minutes in normal print mode, giving a real-world speed of under 2.5ppm. A similar five-page colour text and graphics job produced a speed of under a page per minute. These speeds are poor, even for a cheap printer.
Added to that is the fact that the Stylus DX4400 is noisy – we measured its peak sound output to be 70dBA when it was feeding paper; which is noisy enough to ban it from most living rooms and study areas.
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aviod this one
This printer came with an IMac bundle which was a present for me. At first i thought brillaint i need a new printer to print college docs and photo's. I have only printer about 50-100 sheets had it since about Autumn 08 and have had to replace about 4 cartridges. It doesn't hold ink at all and the quality is ok for basic word processing needs. But for printing photo's aviod and buy a decent photo printer. I am now using my Old Epson C62 which is a total work-horse and is fab!
Posted by Mr C Martin, 13 Jan 2009
Not bad for the money
For almost all colour jobs we found this pretty good providing you set the print quality settings properly in the Windows print options before printing. THis ends up being a good thing, tbh, as you can switch between text only or high quality photo's fairly easy. There _are_ better photo printers out there - and if that's what you want, then get one of them. And there are faster ones and quieter ones, too. But I don't think you'll a better value-for-money one. If you need a printer, that can print good, full-colour posters up to A4 size or print out a range of other colour pages, AND you need a great scanner AND your pocket has limited depth, then this is more than fine - it fits the billet nicely.
Posted by Tim Bancroft, 29 May 2010