Epson Stylus DX7000F review

Although It's fairly common for mono laser multifunction devices, or MFDs, such as OKI's B2540 MFP to send and receive faxes, this feature is rarely found on an inkjet model.

Epson's Stylus DX7000F has a built-in fax modem, but is otherwise a fairly typical inkjet MFD.

Although the DX7000F isn't particularly expensive, it tops Epson's Stylus range of general paurpose MFDs. It has a memory card reader and a PictBridge USB port for making photo prints direct from your camera, and a colour screen for previewing the contents of an inserted memory card. You can make basic edits before making a print, or back up the card's contents to a connected PC.

The DX7000F's printer uses four separate ink cartridges, which install easily enough. Epson's setup program adds drivers for the print and scan functions, and offers a range of optional software such as Creativity Suite, which allows very basic photo editing. We found it simple to get the MFD up and running.

Epson's print driver offers a choice of five quality settings, but none of them produced particularly clean black text on plain paper. The printer's Draft setting produced faint, stripey characters, so we ran our 50-page draft test using Text mode, which was slow. The colours in graphics on plain paper were solid and streak-free using the Text & Image setting, but also dull and under-saturated. Colours in photos seemed a little warmer, but skin tones were a little too cool for a flattering portrait shot.

Fortunately, the DX7000F's scanner was more impressive. It captured sharply focused images, recording plenty of detail from both very light and very dark areas. Colours were accurate, too, but it was slow at high resolutions. Our 1,200dpi (dots per inch) test scan of a 6x4-inch photograph took over three minutes, two or three times longer than we'd expect.

The DX7000F doesn't have an automatic document feeder (ADF), so you have to load each page of a long fax and make copies one page at a time. This is a pain, and makes the DX7000F an unconvincing fax device, particularly when you could buy Lexmark's X5470, the Best Buy in our recent MFD round-up, for £45 less.