Epson Stylus SX525WD multifunction printer-scanner

As the prices of printer-scanner multi-function devices drop from the top of the range at over £200, they lose features until, around £110, they can become quite basic.

That's not the case with Epson's Stylus SX525WD.

While the company has had to trim some features out, such as direct CD and DVD printing and a sheet-feeder for automatic scanning of multi-page documents, it's kept some surprising ones in such as the wireless network connection – which supports WPS for easier connection to routers that also support it – and automatic double-sided printing, known as ‘duplex'.

The well-laid-out printer doesn't use Epson's normal design with a rear paper-feed tray, instead adopting an underslung 150-sheet cassette that slides in neatly from the front. There is no separate photo tray, though, so you will have to change paper to print pictures.

The control panel, also well-designed, has a 63mm colour screen, big enough to display photo thumbnails clearly.

The single-sheet flatbed scanner has a comparatively high resolution of 2,400dpi so it did a good job even on finely detailed originals and worked well with the print engine to produce decent copies.

Unfortunately, the plain-paper print quality held back both copies and prints from being top quality. A fuzziness around black text characters and a darkness to greens and blues meant it gave worse prints than equivalent machines from HP, Kodak and Canon.

Photo prints were much better looking and although they were sometimes a little dark in the shadows, most of the time we were happy with the quality. Print speeds were also good.

Although it was nowhere near the claimed speed of 36 pages per minute (ppm) we saw an impressive maximum black text speed of nearly 13ppm. However, colour is much slower at 1.5ppm. The speed held up even when printing on both sides of the paper, where we measured 7.1 sides per minute, much faster than most printers in this price range.

Ink cartridges are available in two capacities and using the larger ‘Stag' set gives costs of 1.9p for pages of black text and 5.9p for colour, both of which are very good, bettered only by Kodak.