Epson Stylus SX610FW

The Epson Stylus SX610FW is a stylish, well-designed printer/scanner with a cover that incorporates an Automatic Document Feeder (ADF) to be used with the scanner.

The large control panel can be tilted to one of four different angles and has a large, bright screen. On the right, is has an array of menu-navigation buttons, fax controls and a copy button, while on the left, there are illuminated mode buttons for copy, fax, scan and photo upload. It also has a pair of memory card slots and a USB socket to connect a Pictbridge-compatible camera for direct printing.

The steeply-slanted paper tray at the back holds around 100 sheets and the printed pages feed to a tray that extends from the front. Lift the scanner section and it’s easy to plug in the four colour ink cartridges.

As well as a USB connection to a computer, the printer can be attached to a wired or wireless network for shared printing. The setup was automatic but required either a temporary USB cable connection or entering a passcode, supplied by the software.

It works with Windows PCs and Macs using the OS X operating system. It also comes with Abbyy Finereader 6 Sprint for Optical Character Recognition to convert scanned documents into editable text files, as well as some Epson utilities.

The speeds we measured were higher than from most other printers at this price. We printed at 11 pages per minute (ppm) for a five-page text document and 14ppm for a 20-page one.

A single scanned page took 23 seconds and a five-page copy through the ADF completed in 65 seconds. Print quality was reasonable, though there were some ragged edges to curves and text. Slight dither patterns were visible in some colour graphics, but photo prints were top-quality, with natural colours and great detail in both light and shaded areas.

There is a choice of two different sets of ink cartridges for this model. Using the more economical high-yield tanks works out at 1.7p for a black text page and 5.2p for colour. These are good value and the Stylus SX610FW offers an excellent mix of features and performance, but it doesn’t produce the best plain paper prints in the world.