Epson Stylus SX215 review

With prices consistently under a hundred pounds, there are few reasons why you shouldn't own a multi-function device.

The Stylus SX215 is a good-looking choice. Finished in shiny black plastic and with a mock carbon-fibre scanner lid, it sports most of the mod-cons. It comes with a 1.5in LCD, a 1200 x 2400dpi scanner, a card-reader that's compatible with all the major formats, and some remarkable performance claims.

Epson states that the SX215 has a maximum A4 print speed of 'up to' 32ppm and a quickest 6 x 4in photo printing time of one minute 15 seconds. If these were true, the SX215 would be an exceptional choice for a busy home. Unfortunately, we couldn't get close to these claims in our tests.

With the printer at its most basic settings, we managed a print speed of 14ppm for a black-and-white document, though the results looked like they had been printed by a worn-out dot-matrix printer. In normal mode, a 10-page monochrome document took two minutes 33 seconds, or 4ppm, to print. That's still not bad for an inkjet, but it's miles off Epson's claims. At least our normal-quality prints looked good. Characters had slightly jagged edges, but viewed in isolation they were easily good enough for most users. Patches of black were solid and there was a pleasing lack of banding on our prints.

The SX215 holds its own when it comes to printing the odd photo. In its most basic, borderless mode, a print finished in well under a minute, though the quality was best forgotten. In best-quality mode, a borderless print finished in a little under two-and-a-half minutes. It's not record-breaking, but fine for occasional one-offs. With its fairly basic four-ink print engine, the SX215 is at an obvious disadvantage compared to a six- or eight-ink inkjet, and the colours in our tests were a little more speckled than you'd get from a dedicated photo printer.

The same goes for the SX215's scanning tests, which were acceptable but not stunning. Our photo scans were noisy and the colours - particularly gradients - lacked subtlety, which suggests it's best saved for scanning documents where tonal accuracy isn't crucial. It worked well as a straight document copier though: running off 10 copies of an A4 document took two minutes 44 seconds, or a little over than 3.5ppm.

Unfortunately, it's hard to find an area the SX215 excels in. It's reasonably fast and produces acceptable prints. However, the Canon Pixma MP620 trumps it in every department for a little more.