Epson Stylus DX7000F review

Two of the laser multifunction peripherals (MFPs) in this month's Labs on page 98 have a fax modem, but the cheapest of those still costs twice as much as this inkjet MFP.

The Stylus DX7000F can send and receive faxes and make colour scans but, unlike a mono laser MFP, it can also print and make copies in colour.

This MFP has a PictBridge port and memory card reader for making direct prints. With no screen, though, you have to print a proof sheet to select photographs from a card. This feature seems fairly pointless given that the DX7000F isn't built particularly for photographic and creative use; we'd rather Epson had fitted an automatic document feeder (ADF) that would enable easy sending of multiple-page faxes.

The DX7000F is pretty compact, and it's also easy to set up. Tipping up its hinged scanner lets you insert four separate ink cartridges, after which you just need to install the software. Epson's setup program lets you choose the components you want, or you can let the Easy install option add the necessary drivers and a couple of small applications. There's no prompt to align the printer's heads, though. As with most Epson inkjets, doing so is a manual process that involves selecting the best quality from patterns printed on a sheet of paper.

Even after we'd aligned the print heads, we weren't too impressed with the plain-paper print quality. Draft text was faint and stripy, while high-quality and slower print settings produced spidery outlines. For improved quality we performed our Draft speed test at the printer's Text setting. It finished at under four pages per minute (ppm). Though still a little furry, the Text & Image setting was just good enough for our letter test, which was completed at 2.2ppm.

This MFP comes with a set of ICC colour profiles, which should help to guarantee colour accuracy when printing a range of documents. Without them, the colours in our plain paper Normal speed test were solid but lifeless; but installing the ICC profiles made no noticeable difference to any of our results. Photos also looked a little dull and the DX7000F's Durabrite Ultra pigment inks didn't produce a high-gloss photo finish.

Although its printer may be disappointing, the DX7000F's scanner is much better. Its 1,200dpi optical resolution is plenty for most creative tasks, and it produced sharply focused images with accurate colours across the full range of dark and light shades in our test documents. It's not as quick as we'd like, taking 18 seconds for a preview, and a fairly slow 44 seconds for an A4 scan at 300dpi. At 1,200dpi, our 6x4in photo scan took just over three minutes, which is much slower than we'd expect.

With a simple mono LCD screen and plenty of buttons, we expected the DX7000F to be easy to use without a PC. Basic operations are simple, but the buttons are marked with icons that don't offer much help. We gave up trying to change the copy quality; the default setting produced decent results in black only or colour, but it was slow - particularly in colour, where a single-page copy took two minutes and 25 seconds.

The DX7000F has a good scanner, but its print quality is fairly basic and, without an ADF, it isn't a convincing fax machine. For half the money you can buy Lexmark's X5470, which has similar features and a basic 10-sheet ADF.