Epson Stylus D92 review

You might think that under £40 won't buy you a lot of printer.

You would, technically, be right. The Stylus D92 doesn't have a screen, or even many controls on its face. It doesn't have a memory card reader, which means that, try as you might, you'll struggle to get any use from it when it's not plugged into a PC. Still, it's a four-colour inkjet from a well-respected manufacturer. But is it any good?

Our speed results were promising, with the D92 living up to its claimed 25 pages per minute on a black-and-white document, at least in draft mode. In regular mode you'll see more like 2.6ppm, which is sluggish but not terrible for an inkjet.

The bad news is the text print quality. As you'd expect, draft mode looked poor, but even normal mode didn't hold up well to close examination. It's not awful, and for the odd school project it might be fine. But for work that will be seen by colleagues, it doesn't come close to the output of more expensive beasts.

It's a similar story for photos. An A4 image on Epson's best-quality photo paper took 13 minutes to emerge. A 6 x 4-inch print took more than four minutes. These aren't outrageous for a cheap inkjet, but print quality took a knock each time, with our images appearing rather faint. Colours were far from striking, and there was plenty of grain.

As a printer intended for the home and kids, though, the Epson Stylus D92 fits the bill. It's not too slow, and gives not too bad print quality. And it costs £40. As ever, though, the cost of ink rears its ugly head. Epson's best value multipack of ink cartridges (part code C13T071540) costs £19.95 from dealers. You'll soon have shelled out more for ink than you did for the printer. Going by Epson's quoted page yields, a single mono page will cost you just short of 3p, while a page using all four colours will run you just short of 8p. That's before you buy fancy paper.

As a printer that will see limited use, and all of it non-critical, the D92 is good enough. But if you depend on the quality of your printed output, or plan to print a lot of pages, you should look elsewhere.

Author: Dave Stevenson