Epson Stylus SX425W multifunction printer-scanner

We looked at Epson's SX525WD printer-scanner recently (see sidebar), and now it's the turn of the cheaper SX425W. Both can print, scan and copy, and connect to a computer over USB or a wireless network.

But the D in the earlier model's name indicates duplex or double-sided printing, which this cannot do. Otherwise it's slower and quality isn't as high: the SX425W prints fewer droplets of ink per square inch than the SX525WD.

It has Epson's standard rear-feeding paper tray holding, in theory, 120 sheets of plain paper, but we found that any more than 40 sheets caused it to confusingly display ‘Paper out. Load paper' on its screen.

Paper feeds out at the front and as with the 525 there's no separate input tray for photo paper. Both input and output trays telescope out so they can be folded away to save space when the printer isn't in use but can be unfolded to catch printed sheets.

The four ink cartridges slot in by lifting the whole scanner section, but it doesn't angle up very far, so we had to lean in uncomfortably to fit them. The screen was small but useful and colourful, with simple buttons around it for various functions. A single memory card slot takes SD, XD and Memory Stick Pro cards for direct printing of photos without a computer.

Copies came out well with good contrast between light and dark, and a colour A4 page took just under a minute. Scans were likewise impressive, with basic but decent scanning software supplied. If you have a photo-editing or OCR program installed you can scan straight to that instead.

Text was quick to print in draft mode, which was faint but usable for proof-reading: it produced the first page in under nine seconds, working out at 13 pages per minute (ppm) overall. In the ‘best' text mode it took 12 seconds for the first page and managed 5ppm.

In this mode there was a little ink bleed, but text looked respectable. A colour A4 photo at ‘best photo' quality took a sluggish nine minutes and 16 seconds and looked OK but not up to the standards of most £100 printers.

We also found that when we had a stack of paper in the input holder, even the slightest misalignment (if they weren't perfectly straight in the tray) would cause the printer to stop and protest about a paper jam. Correcting this entailed simply pulling the sheets undamaged out of the top of the tray but it was annoying.

In all, this cheap printer-scanner does the job, but between the poor paper handling, slow photo prints and relatively poor photo print quality, we'd recommend the more expensive SX525WD instead.