Epson Stylus S21

The Stylus S21 is Epson's cheapest inkjet printer - at £32 it’s almost an impulse buy.

It's designed very much for home users and students, with simple features, but using separate ink cartridges for better economy.

It is a relatively wide printer but it’s not very deep, until you clip in the two paper trays. The front tray, for supporting printed documents, is nearly as deep as a sheet of A4 and the near-vertical one at the back also adds depth to the device.

There are just two control buttons, one for power and the other for cartridge changes and head cleaning. A single USB socket is the only connection other than for the power cable.

Epson claims speeds of up to 26 pages per minute (ppm) for black and 14ppm for colour. Even assuming draft print, no allowance for processing time and a following wind, it's hard to see how the company could record such figures. We managed a maximum print speed of 2.4ppm for black text and a colour speed under one page a minute, both in normal print mode. A 15 x 10cm colour photo took two minutes.

These speeds are very slow: it's a long while since we have seen an inkjet printer take longer than a minute to produce an A4 colour page. While all printer makers quote unlikely speeds, it’s stretching things to claim speeds over 10 times what users are likely to see.

The other problem with the Stylus S21 is noise. It’s quite noisy while printing, but when it was feeding paper the noise level rose a lot further, peaking at well over 70dBA. This is loud enough to be very intrusive and to make users reluctant to put the printer on the desk where they work.

The quality of print on plain paper was fair, with some bleed (spread of ink into the paper fibres) and slight jaggedness of text characters, but colours were bright and registration (sharpness of black text over colour) was good. Photo prints were good enough for snaps.

The four ink cartridges clip easily into the print head and are surprisingly cheap, giving per-page costs of 2.7p for black and 7.4p for colour.

This is a cheap printer to buy and run, but we would recommend a more expensive model if speed and quality are important to you, not to mention the noise.